Filmmaker Errol Morris ran a surreptitious test in the New York Times to determine "Could the mere selection of a font influence us to believe one thing rather than another?" He concludes "But is there a font that promotes, engenders a belief that a sentence is true? Or at least nudges us in that direction? And indeed there is. It is Baskerville."
Hear, All Ye People; Hearken, O Earth (Part One) is a fun (long) read.
I've changed my iPad's Instaper font from Georgia (second place) to Baskerville, so now I'll really believe all the articles I read.
1 comment:
I have to say that this reminds me of the good old days in our required psychology classes at Carnegie Mellon where part of the requirements for the class were to participate in the psychology experiments. We were free sources of subjects for their experimentation.
As I recall the tests in the experiments always seemed to be about one thing, for instance, performing a word search, but were really about measureing something completely different, such as the color of the pen you chose to use to do the word search (true story).
I guess you can't let your experimental subjects know what you are doing. I just don't remember signing a psychology testing waiver form when I did took that New York Times survey...
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