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Intuitions of beauty and truth: what is easy on the mind is beautiful and true
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INTUITIONS OF TRUTH AND BEAUTY
Intuitions of Beauty and Truth:
What is Easy on the Mind is Beautiful and True
by
Lynn (Lin) Zhang
University of Southern California
A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY
May, 2022
Copyright 2022 Lynn (Lin) Zhang
INTUITIONS OF TRUTH AND BEAUTY ii
Acknowledgments
Throughout my Ph.D. career and the process of writing this dissertation, I have received a
great deal of support and guidance from various people (and animals).
First and foremost, I would like to express my deepest gratitude to my faculty advisor,
Dr. Norbert Schwarz. Throughout my Ph.D. career, his nourishing guidance, invaluable insight,
and constructive feedback have enabled both my growth as a researcher and my personal
development as a graduate student. Without his continuous support, the work presented in this
dissertation would not have been accomplished, and I would not be where I am today.
Second, I am also extremely grateful to my additional mentors, Dr. Daphna Oyserman,
and Dr. Eryn Newman, for imparting their knowledge and providing continuous guidance to me
from the very first day. Their advice and insight have made invaluable contributions to the work
presented in this dissertation and to my academic growth.
I also want to express my gratitude to the rest of my dissertation committee, for teaching
me the essential skills as a researcher in class, for providing me helpful advice and feedback for
the work in this dissertation, and for offering their valuable time to guide me through the process.
Lastly, I would like to pay my special regards to my family: my mother, my cat Bella, and
my dog Furfur. I am extremely grateful to my mother, who has endured a great deal of hardship
by raising me as a single mother, for her unwavering support and for the strength she has shown
me. In addition, I am very grateful for my irresistibly cute cat Bella’s catsonal support and loving
companionship throughout graduate school and the pandemic. I am also deeply thankful for my
incredibly sweet dog Furfur, who recently passed away but will always be with me in my heart,
for bringing me and my family so much joy in the past 15 years.
INTUITIONS OF TRUTH AND BEAUTY iii
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Acknowledgments ii
Abstract iv
Introduction 1
Chapter 1: Intuitions of Beauty and Truth 4
Chapter 2 - Truthiness: How Photos Influence Perceived Truth 43
Chapter 3: Conceptual Metaphors, Processing Fluency, and Aesthetic Preferences 70
Chapter 4 - Linguistic Frequencies, Processing Fluency, and Liking 98
Concluding Remarks 115
References 117
Appendix A 154
Appendix B 168
Appendix C 176
INTUITIONS OF TRUTH AND BEAUTY iv
Abstract
Previous research has shown that people’s judgments are influenced by the metacognitive
ease or difficulty they experience when processing information related to the judgment at hand
For example, materials that are easy to process are perceived as more positive, more familiar,
more likely to be true, and as enjoying higher social consensus (for a review, see Schwarz,
Jalbert, Noah, & L. Zhang, 2021). This dissertation investigates the influence of such
metacognitive feelings on perceptions of truth and beauty, including a review of the current state
of research and experiments that test novel hypotheses and advance this literature. Chapter 1
reviews the current state of research on how metacognitive ease or difficulty of processing
influences judgments of truth and beauty. Chapter 2 discusses the role of metacognitive
experiences in truth perceptions by examining the underlying mechanism of truthiness - a
phenomenon where the perceived veracity of claims is influenced by accompanying photos, even
when the photos do not provide any evidence for the claims. Chapters 3 and 4 turn to intuitions
of beauty by identifying novel variables that facilitate processing and increase liking but had not
previously received attention in the field of aesthetics. Together, the work presented in this
dissertation shows that judgments of truth and beauty are often formed intuitively and influenced
by similar mechanisms, that is, the metacognitive processing experiences that accompany
thinking.
INTUITIONS OF TRUTH AND BEAUTY 1
Introduction
Many of the judgments and decisions people make in everyday life - from what they find
true and persuasive to what they like - are based on intuitive reasoning. The feelings they have at
the time of judgment are an important input into the process. Previous research has shown that
materials that are easy to process are perceived as more positive, more familiar, more likely to be
true, and as enjoying higher social consensus (for reviews, see Alter & Oppenheimer, 2009;
Schwarz, Jalbert, Noah, & L. Zhang, 2021). This dissertation is based on a series of projects that
investigate the influence of metacognitive feelings on perceptions of truth and beauty, including
a review of the current state of research and experiments that test novel hypotheses and advance
this literature. These projects are presented in multiple chapters and each chapter makes a unique
contribution to fluency research.
Chapter 1 reviews the current state of research on how metacognitive ease or difficulty of
processing influences various judgments, with an emphasis on judgments of truth and beauty.
This chapter is modified from an already published article in Consumer Psychology Review
(Schwarz et al., 2021).
Chapter 2 discusses the role of metacognitive experiences in truth perceptions by
examining the underlying mechanism of truthiness - a phenomenon where the perceived veracity
of claims is influenced by accompanying photos, even when the photos do not provide any
evidence for the claims. The two experiments in this chapter demonstrate that the effects of such
photos on perceived truth are driven by the metacognitive ease or difficulty when processing the
claims. This chapter has been published as a research article in the Journal of Experimental
Social Psychology (L. Zhang, Newman, & Schwarz, 2021).
INTUITIONS OF TRUTH AND BEAUTY 2
Chapters 3 and 4 turn to intuitions of beauty by examining factors that influence aesthetic
preferences and liking. Based on previous research that ease of processing enhances aesthetic
pleasure (Reber et al., 2004; Schwarz et al., 2021), the nine experiments presented in Chapters 3
and 4 identify novel variables that facilitate processing and increase liking but had not previously
received attention in the field of aesthetics.
Chapter 3 consists of a series of six experiments that introduce metaphor congruence as a
novel variable that impacts processing experience. Specifically, these experiments show that
visual arrangements that are congruent with conceptual metaphors (e.g., good things are “up”
and bad things are “down”) are liked more than incongruent ones. The chapter also explores this
congruency effect cross-culturally by comparing the preferences between English and Farsi
speakers and demonstrates that visual stimuli that are congruent with the associated conceptual
metaphors in one’s language are preferred by speakers of both languages. This chapter has been
published as a research article in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology (L. Zhang,
Atari, Schwarz, Newman, & Afhami, 2022).
Chapter 4 consists of three experiments that investigate the influence of yet another
previously ignored variable - the ordering of semantic concepts in language (e.g., “salt and
pepper” vs. “pepper and salt”) - on people’s preference for visual materials. Three experiments
show that people prefer visual stimuli that arrange things in the order in which they commonly
appear in their language. For example, analyses of the Corpus of Contemporary American
English (Davis 2009, 2010) show that the expression “mom and dad” is used more frequently
than “dad and mom” in American English. Consistent with this linguistic regularity, American
INTUITIONS OF TRUTH AND BEAUTY 3
participants preferred visual arrangements that placed a photo of “mom” to the left of a photo of
“dad” over arrangements that reversed this order (L. Zhang & Schwarz, 2021).
Together, the work reported in this dissertation shows that judgments of truth and beauty
are often formed intuitively and influenced by similar mechanisms, that is, the metacognitive
processing experiences that accompany thinking.
INTUITIONS OF TRUTH AND BEAUTY 4
Chapter 1: Intuitions of Beauty and Truth
1
1 Chapter Introduction
Every component of forming a judgment or making a decision can feel easy or difficult.
New information can be easy or difficult to see, read, or hear; previously acquired information
can be easy or difficult to retrieve; written or spoken language can be easy or difficult to
comprehend; mental representations of targets and standards can be easy or difficult to form;
inferences can be easy or difficult to arrive at, arguments easy or difficult to generate, and
choices easy or difficult to make. As hundreds of experiments across the cognitive and
behavioral sciences document, the subjective experience of ease or difficulty has consequences.
It can itself serve as a source of information in judgment and choice, can qualify the implications
of other accessible information, and can influence which processing strategies people choose. In
this review, we highlight key insights from several decades of research into the fluent or disfluent
processing of information, identify open questions, and suggest promising avenues for further
investigation.
We first review variables that influence processing fluency and conceptualize the use of
metacognitive experiences in judgment and decision making in the framework of
feelings-as-information theory (Schwarz, 2012). We then turn to the role of metacognitive
experiences in people’s assessments of truth and their influence on the acceptance, sharing, and
1
Chapter 1 is adapted from Schwarz, N., Jalbert, M., Noah, T., & Zhang, L. (2020).
Metacognitive experiences as information: Processing fluency in consumer judgment and
decision making. Consumer Psychology Review, 4(1), 4–25. https://doi.org/10.1002/arcp.1067
Open access view.
INTUITIONS OF TRUTH AND BEAUTY 5
correction of (mis)information (section 4). Finally, we revisit the role of metacognitive
experiences in aesthetic appreciation and discuss judgments related to beauty.
2 Metacognitive Experiences as Information
2.1. Sources of Ease and Difficulty
Numerous variables can influence the ease of information processing. Visual and auditory
attributes of a stimulus can influence the speed and accuracy of low-level processes concerned
with the identification of the stimulus' physical identity and form. Examples include
figure-ground contrast (e.g., Reber & Schwarz, 1999); the readability of hand-writing (e.g.,
Greifeneder et al., 2010) and print fonts (e.g., Song & Schwarz, 2008a); the clarity of auditory
presentations (e.g., Newman & Schwarz, 2018) and familiarity of a speaker’s accent (e.g.,
Lev-Ari & Keysar, 2010) or the duration of stimulus presentation (e.g., Whittlesea et al., 1990).
The associated metacognitive experience is often referred to as perceptual fluency (Jacoby,
Kelley, & Dywan, 1989). Other variables influence the speed and accuracy of high-level
processes concerned with the identification of stimulus meaning and its relation to semantic
knowledge structures. Some of these variables are attributes of the stimulus, such as the
complexity (e.g., Lowrey, 1998) or coherence (e.g., Topolinski, 2012) of a message and the
compatibility of stimulus elements with applicable metaphors (e.g., Cian et al., 2015). Other
variables reflect contextual influences, such as the consistency of the stimulus with its context
(e.g., Masson & Caldwell, 1998), the contextual accessibility of applicable knowledge (e.g., Lee
& Labroo, 2004), and the frequency of concept collocations in the corpus of natural language
INTUITIONS OF TRUTH AND BEAUTY 6
(e.g., L. Zhang & Schwarz, 2020). The associated metacognitive experience of ease or difficulty
is often referred to as conceptual fluency (Whittlesea, 1993).
How fluently a stimulus can be processed is also influenced by perceiver variables, from
the perceiver’s color vision (e.g., Álvaro et al., 2015), applicable knowledge (e.g., Bransford &
Johnson, 1972) and cultural expertise (Oyserman, 2019) to temporary or chronic differences in
the perceiver’s cognitive ability and motivation. Perceiver variables can influence perceptual
and/or conceptual fluency and frequently involve stimulus x perceiver interactions. For example,
depending on one’s native language, some words are harder to pronounce than others (e.g.,
Newman et al., 2014) and some word collocations feel more familiar (e.g., Siyanova-Chanturia
et al., 2011); writing feels more difficult when using one’s non-dominant hand (Briñol & Petty,
2003); and figure-ground contrast can depend on one’s color vision (Álvaro et al., 2015).
Additionally, stimuli may be harder to process in situations where cognitive capacity is limited.
Limited cognitive capacity may result from a myriad of factors – from multitasking (e.g., Lin, et
al., 2016) to sleep deprivation (e.g., Lim & Dinges, 2010), depression (McDermott & Ebmeier,
2009), and poverty (Mani et al., 2013) – leading to decreased processing speed and increased
experiences of disfluency. In addition, incidental bodily sensations can elicit feelings of ease or
difficulty. For example, tensing the corrugator during task performance (as in furrowing one’s
brow) makes anything seem harder, from recalling examples of one’s behavior (e.g., Stepper &
Strack, 1993) to generating arguments (e.g., Sanna et al., 2002) and recognizing names (e.g.,
Strack & Neumann, 2000).
These diverse stimuli, context, and perceiver variables have qualitatively similar effects
(for reviews, see Alter & Oppenheimer, 2009; Winkielman et al., 2003), which reflects that
INTUITIONS OF TRUTH AND BEAUTY 7
different sources of (dis)fluency result in similar phenomenal experiences. Hence, we refer to
processing fluency without distinguishing between its perceptual and conceptual components.
2.2 What the Experience Conveys
Easy processing is more pleasant than difficult processing and elicits a spontaneous
positive affective response (section 2.2.1). The processing experience also conveys that what one
does is easy or difficult. What people conclude from this depends on which of many potentially
applicable lay theories of mental processes they bring to bear, that is, their metacognitive
knowledge (section 2.2.2).
2.2.1 Affective Response. Easy processing is accompanied by a spontaneous affective
response that can be captured with psychophysiological measures as well as self-reports. In a
classic study, Winkielman and Cacioppo (2001) presented degraded drawings of common objects
and facilitated or impaired perception through a preceding matching or mismatching prime.
Using electromyography (EMG) they found that easy processing was accompanied by increased
zygomaticus (smiling muscle) activity and concluded that “mind at ease puts a smile on the face”
(Winkielman & Cacioppo, 2001, p. 989). Increased zygomaticus activation has also been
observed when fluency is manipulated through repeated exposure (e.g., Harmon-Jones & Allen,
2001) or prototypicality (e.g., Winkielman et al., 2006). Conversely, Topolinski and colleagues
(2009) observed increased corrugator (frowning muscle) activity when participants processed
disfluent material. Self-reports of momentary feelings (e.g., Monahan et al., 2000) parallel the
psychophysiological findings, although conscious awareness of an affective response is not
always observed (Janiszewski, 1993; Zajonc, 1980).
Reviewing diverse findings bearing on the fluency-affect link, Winkielman and
INTUITIONS OF TRUTH AND BEAUTY 8
colleagues (2003) concluded that processing fluency is hedonically marked and experienced as
positive. Several factors are likely to contribute to this. High fluency may elicit positive affect
because it is associated with progress toward successful recognition of the stimulus, error-free
processing, or the availability of appropriate knowledge structures to interpret the stimulus
(Carver & Scheier, 1990; Derryberry & Tucker, 1994; Ramachandran & Hirstein, 1999). High
fluency may also elicit positive affect because it signals that an external stimulus is familiar, and
thus unlikely to be harmful (Zajonc, 1968, 1998) – “if you know it, it hasn’t eaten you yet” as
Zajonc used to put it.
The elicited affective response can serve as a source of information in related judgments,
paralleling the influence of other sources of affective experience (for a review, see Schwarz &
Clore, 2007). In contrast to what some researchers concluded, this does not imply that fluent
processing will always result in more positive evaluations. Affective responses are a source of
information and what people conclude from that information depends on its perceived
diagnosticity and the accessible inference rule used, which is a function of context and task (e.g.,
Kim et al., 2010; Martin et al., 1997).
2.2.2 Metacognitive Knowledge: Lay Theories of Mental Process. Because thinking
can be easy or difficult for many reasons, it is often unclear to the individual why a given
metacognitive experience arises. For example, a text may be difficult to follow because the
reader is tired and distracted, because the lighting is poor, or because the arguments are
incoherent. What people infer from a given metacognitive experience depends on which of
many potentially applicable lay theories of mental processes they apply. People’s lay theories of
mental processes are usually correct in the sense that they correctly describe conditions that can
INTUITIONS OF TRUTH AND BEAUTY 9
make processing easy or difficult. However, the respective variable may not have been the one at
work in the present case.
Consistent with the pragmatic (James, 1890) and situated (Smith & Semin, 2004) nature
of cognition, an applicable lay theory is usually brought to mind by the task at hand and allows
the person to arrive at an answer that seems “obvious” in the given context (Schwarz, 2004,
2010). Other potentially applicable theories receive little attention, consistent with the general
observation that information search is truncated once a satisfactory judgment has been achieved
(Einhorn & Hogarth, 1986; Wyer, 1974) – nevertheless, one of those neglected lay theories might
have guided the person’s inferences had it come to mind first. This renders inferences from
metacognitive experiences highly malleable. People correctly assume, for example, that familiar
(previously seen) material is easier to process than novel material. Hence, they erroneously
“recognize” a novel stimulus as one they have previously seen whenever the stimulus is easy to
process, even when this ease results solely from other variables, such as the clarity or duration of
stimulus presentation (Whittlesea et al., 1990). People also correctly assume that is easier to
perceive a stimulus that is shown with high rather than low clarity or for a long rather than short
time. Hence, they erroneously infer higher clarity or longer duration when the stimulus is easy to
process due to previous exposure (e.g., Witherspoon & Allan, 1985; Whittlesea et al., 1990).
Accordingly, presentation variables can give rise to “illusions of memory”, just as memory
variables can give rise to “illusions of perception” (for a review, see Kelley & Rhodes, 2002). In
both cases, the task (“Have you seen this before?” vs. “For how long has this been shown?”)
brings an applicable lay theory of mental processes to mind, which is applied to the current
subjective experience.
INTUITIONS OF TRUTH AND BEAUTY 10
At present, little is known about people’s sensitivity to the applicability of different lay
theories under naturalistic conditions. The observation that lay theories about what makes mental
processes easy or difficult are mostly correct indicates that processing fluency can provide
ecologically valid information (for reviews, see Herzog & Hertwig, 2013; Unkelbach &
Greifeneder, 2013). However, people’s insensitivity to the source of their fluency experience
challenges the hope that this information is used in ecologically sensible ways. The available
studies indicate that people can draw different inferences from the same metacognitive
experience because the experimenter insinuates different lay theories (e.g., Briñol et al., 2006;
Winkielman & Schwarz, 2001), the dependent variable brings different lay theories to mind (e.g.,
Whittlesea et al., 1990) or participants are taught an applicable lay theory through many
experimental trials (e.g., Unkelbach, 2007). The latter induction of a lay theory is sometimes
credited as being more ecologically valid (e.g., Corneille et al., 2020) but its effects are
indistinguishable from other manipulations that render applicable lay theories accessible.
Moreover, lay theories that are learned through many experimental trials do not seem to
generalize beyond the specific experimental setting and fluency variable used (e.g., Silva et al.,
2016); we return to this issue in our discussion of fluency effects on judgments of truth. What is
crucial is not how a lay theory is acquired, but which lay theory is accessible and applicable in
context. Hence, lay theories that are brought to mind by the judgment task itself enjoy an
advantage in terms of generalization across situations.
2.3 Does the Experience Bear on the Target of Judgment?
The use of metacognitive experiences in judgment follows the logic of
feelings-as-information theory (for a review, see Schwarz, 2012), which was initially developed
INTUITIONS OF TRUTH AND BEAUTY 11
to conceptualize the role of affect in evaluative judgment (Schwarz & Clore, 1983, 2003). The
theory assumes that people attend to their feelings (metacognitive experiences, moods, emotions,
and bodily sensations) as a source of information, which they use like any other information.
Whether the feeling provides valid information depends on whether it is elicited by the object of
judgment or due to some incidental influence, that is, whether the feeling is “integral” to the
judgment or “incidental” in Bodenhausen’s (1993) terminology. For example, the experience of
difficulty provides ecologically valid information about the unfamiliarity of an argument when it
results from a lack of previous exposure, but not when it results from a poor print font or any
other incidental variable.
Because people are more sensitive to their feelings than to the source of their feelings,
they often misread incidental feelings as bearing on the object of judgment, unless their attention
is explicitly drawn to an incidental source (for reviews, see Schwarz, 2012; Schwarz & Clore,
2007). Whenever a feeling is attributed to an incidental source, its informational value is
undermined and the otherwise observed influence attenuated or eliminated. For example,
realizing that a text is difficult to process because the print font is hard to read eliminates the
influence of processing fluency on judgment and choice (Novemsky et al., 2007), just as
realizing one’s bad mood is due to rainy weather eliminates its influence on unrelated judgments
(Schwarz & Clore, 1983). Conversely, experiencing a feeling despite opposing influences
increases its perceived informational value. For example, finding recall easy despite allegedly
distracting music enhances the impact of easy retrieval (Schwarz, Bless, et al., 1991).
Finally, people are more sensitive to changes in sensory input than to stable states, as
known since the early days of perception research (for a review, see Berelson & Steiner, 1964).
INTUITIONS OF TRUTH AND BEAUTY 12
They also consider changes more informative than stable states, consistent with the covariation
principle of attribution research (Kelley, 1972). Accordingly, metacognitive experiences are more
influential when people experience changes in fluency, e.g., when one target is more fluently
processed than another. This makes within-participant manipulations, where fluency changes
from one stimulus to the next, more powerful than between-participant manipulations, where
some participants are only exposed to easy-to-process and others only to difficult-to-process
material (for reviews, see Dechêne et al., 2010; Wänke & Hansen, 2015).
2.4 The Relative Impact of Experiential and Declarative Information
As the term implies, “metacognitive” experiences emerge from the dynamics of
information processing, which is a reminder that there are always two sources of information: the
information being processed and the experience this processing elicits. Which of these sources of
information is likely to exert more influence under which conditions?
2.4.1 Processing Motivation and Ability Influence Reliance on Feelings. One answer
to this question is consistent with familiar assumptions of most dual-process models, from Petty
and Cacioppo’s (1986) elaboration likelihood model to Strack and Deutsch’s (2004)
reflective-impulsive model and Kahneman’s (2011) discussion of fast and intuitive (system 1)
and slow but systematic (system 2) thinking. A systematic use of declarative information is most
likely when processing motivation and cognitive ability are high, and the opportunity to engage
in intense processing is unconstrained by time pressure (e. g, Pham et al., 2001; Siemer &
Reisenzein, 1998), cognitive load (e.g. Albarracín & Kumkale, 2003), and related variables;
conversely, intuitive processing and reliance on one’s metacognitive experiences and other
feelings increase when processing motivation, ability and/or opportunity are low (for reviews,
INTUITIONS OF TRUTH AND BEAUTY 13
see Greifeneder et al., 2011; Greifeneder & Schwarz, 2014). However, several caveats are
needed.
Most studies addressing the relative impact of declarative information and metacognitive
experience relied on the ease-of-retrieval paradigm (Schwarz et al., 1991), which explicitly
pitches thought content and retrieval fluency against one another. For example, participants may
be asked to list a few or many examples of their assertive behavior before evaluating their own
assertiveness. Participants who rely on the accessible declarative information should judge
themselves as more assertive after recalling many than only a few examples. However, recalling
many examples is more difficult than recalling a few; hence, participants who rely on their
metacognitive experience should judge themselves as less assertive after recalling many.
Empirically, the judgment is consistent with the implications of recalled content when recall is
easy, but opposite to the implications of recalled content when recall is difficult, unless the
informational value of the recall experience is called into question through misattribution
manipulations (Schwarz et al., 1991; for a meta-analysis of 263 experiments, see Weingarten &
Hutchinson, 2018). These opposing effects made the paradigm attractive for studying the relative
reliance on content and ease in judgment formation. The bulk of the available studies indicates
that reliance on accessible declarative information is higher, and reliance on ease of retrieval
lower, under conditions of high personal relevance of the topic (e.g., Greifeneder, 2007;
Haddock, 2002; Rothman & Schwarz, 1998), high accuracy motivation (e.g., Aarts &
Dijksterhuis (1999), and high need for cognition (e.g., Florack & Zoabi, 2003). Conversely,
impairing people’s processing capacity through cognitive load (e.g., Greifeneder & Bless, 2007)
increases reliance on the experience and decreases reliance on accessible content.
INTUITIONS OF TRUTH AND BEAUTY 14
Note, however, that people may also bring their metacognitive experience to bear on the
validity of the content of their thoughts (Briñol & Petty, 2009), which results in more confidence
in what they recalled when recall was easy rather than difficult. Because such assessments of
confidence are more likely under high importance and high need for cognition, this provides an
indirect pathway for metacognitive experiences to influence judgment under conditions of
systematic processing (e.g., Tormala et al., 2002; Wänke & Bless, 2000).
2.4.2 Feelings Influence Processing Motivation. Thinking is for doing (James, 1890)
and mental processes are tuned to the requirements at hand. Consistent with this assumption,
people are more likely to engage in detail-oriented effortful processing when something seems
wrong than when things seem to be going fine (e.g., Vallacher & Wegner, 1987). Feelings play a
key role in this tuning process and numerous variables – from the perceiver’s mood (e.g., Bless
et al., 1990) and the color of the paper on which a task is printed (e.g., Sinclair et al., 1998) to
exposure to culturally disfluent stimuli (e.g., Lin, Arieli, & Oyserman, 2019) —can influence
processing motivation and strategy (for a review, see Schwarz & Clore, 2007). Using the ease of
retrieval paradigm, Ruder and Bless (2003) found that participants in a happy mood were more
likely to rely on their metacognitive experience, whereas participants in a sad mood were more
likely to rely on recalled content. As reviewed in section 3, disfluency can itself be a problem
signal that increases detailed analysis (e.g., Song & Schwarz, 2008b). Overall, this privileges
reliance on declarative information in situations that seem problematic but reliance on
experiential information, including metacognitive experiences, in situations that seem benign.
2.4.3 Feelings in a Social Context: Power and State of Mind. One marker of a
potentially problematic situation is when others have control over one’s outcomes, but oneself
INTUITIONS OF TRUTH AND BEAUTY 15
can do little to influence the outcomes of others. This undesirable constellation characterizes
situations of low power (Cartwright, 1959; Thibaut & Kelley, 1959), whereas the opposite
characterizes situations of high power. Testing the influence of power on strategies of
information processing, Guinote and her colleagues (for a review, see Guinote, 2015)
consistently found that being high in power increases reliance on one’s feelings, whereas being
low in power reduces it. In ease of retrieval experiments, participants who feel powerful – either
due to a temporary manipulation or a chronic disposition – rely more on their metacognitive
experience than participants who feel powerless (Weick & Guinote, 2008). Presumably,
powerful individuals can afford to process information selectively, whereas powerless
individuals need to pay attention to multiple sources of information and interpret information
beyond its face value to increase predictability and control (Guinote, 2007, 2015). Similarly,
Yahalom and Schul (2013) observed that concerns about the potential involvement of another
person in the situation reduces reliance on ease of retrieval and increases reliance on retrieved
content. For example, when participants were led to believe that the task they were requested to
complete was selected randomly, they based their judgments on experienced ease of recall, but
when led to believe that another person had selected the task for them, they relied on recalled
content.
Even the mere feeling of being observed by another person can be sufficient to reduce
reliance on one’s metacognitive experience. Noah et al. (2018a) replicated a series of fluency
experiments (including ease of recall and ease of reading) under conditions of privacy and
anonymity versus conditions where people felt observed. Whereas the usual fluency effects
replicated under conditions of privacy (which resembled the conditions of the original
INTUITIONS OF TRUTH AND BEAUTY 16
experiments), feeling observed undermined participants’ reliance on their metacognitive
experiences. Merely thinking about how others may perceive them reduced participants’ reliance
on their own internal states as a source of information (Noah et al., 2018a). Extending these
findings to bodily sensations in the form of facial feedback, Noah and colleagues (2018b) found
that turning on a video camera was sufficient to undermine the otherwise observed impact of
facial feedback on judgments of amusement (Stracket al., 1988). Noah and colleagues’ findings
suggest that people who feel observed may adopt an external perspective on themselves (Hass,
1984) that privileges information that is accessible to an observer and impairs the use of private
information to which the observer has no access, such as one’s metacognitive experiences and
bodily sensations.
2.5 Measuring Processing Fluency
Ease of processing can be assessed with objective and subjective measures. Objective
measures include the use of reaction time (for example, to assess retrieval fluency; Schooler &
Hertwig, 2005), and eye-tracking (for example, to assess the difficulty of reading and visual
navigation; Bae, 2019; Chrobot, 2014). Note, however, that objective measures do not
necessarily capture the subjective experience – whether something feels easy or difficult depends
at least as much on the perceiver’s expectations or preceding experience as on objective speed.
Hence, the subjective experience of fluent processing is a better predictor of judgment than
objective fluency in form of processing time (e.g., Forster et al., 2013). Accordingly, measures
that focus on the subjective experience are usually preferred, e. g., in the form of a direct
question about how easy or difficult a text was to read.
INTUITIONS OF TRUTH AND BEAUTY 17
More complex multi-item self-report measures have been developed (Graf et al., 2018;
Kostyk et al., 2019). To validate their measure, Graf and colleagues (2018) replicated nine
experiments with diverse fluency manipulations and showed that the effects were mediated by
participants’ self-reported fluency experience. Their single-item measure (a rating with the
verbal end anchors “difficult” and “easy”) performed as well as a five-item measure. Recall,
however, that people do not draw on their fluency experience when they become aware that it
may be due to an incidental source. Hence, any measure that may draw attention to the
manipulation needs to follow the last dependent variable of interest -- or else a reviewer’s
well-intentioned recommendation to capture the presumed mediator before the dependent
variable may thwart the very effect one hoped to find.
2.6 Summary
In sum, numerous variables can influence processing fluency. Easy processing is pleasant
and elicits a positive affective response. The experience also informs the person that the task is
easy or difficult. The subjective experience is not considered informative for the judgment at
hand when it is (correctly or incorrectly) attributed to another source. What specifically people
infer from their subjective experience of effort and/or affect depends on the inference rule they
apply. In addition, people’s relative reliance on declarative and experiential information is
influenced by their processing motivation and capacity and their perception of the current
situation as problematic or benign. Whereas these influences are consistent with decades of
related research, recent experiments further suggest that feeling observed may elicit an outside
perspective on the self that impairs reliance on internal information that is not accessible to an
INTUITIONS OF TRUTH AND BEAUTY 18
observer. The following section addresses the influence of processing fluency on perceived truth
and its implications for social media and public opinion.
3 Fluency and Truth
Disinformation campaigns related to Brexit and the 2016 presidential elections in the
United States fostered a broad interest in how people determine whether something is likely to be
true. Here, we highlight the role of metacognitive experiences in the acceptance and correction of
misinformation (for extended discussions, see Brashier & Marsh, 2020; Lewandowskyet al.,
2012; Schwarz, 2015, and the contributions in Forgas & Baumeister, 2019; Greifeneder et al.,
2020).
3.1 Assessing Truth
In most situations of daily life, people proceed on the tacit assumption that speakers are
cooperative communicators whose contributions are relevant to the ongoing conversation,
truthful, informative, and clear (Grice, 1975; Schwarz, 1994; Sperber & Wilson, 1986). This
makes the acceptance of claims the default in most situations, unless salient cues suggest that
closer scrutiny may be needed. When people assess the truth of a claim, they are likely to rely on
a subset of five criteria that dominate truth testing (Schwarz, 2015): (1) Is the claim compatible
with other things I know? (2) Is the claim coherent and internally consistent? (3) Does the claim
come from a credible source? (4) Do other people agree with this claim? (5) Is there sufficient
supporting evidence? Each of these criteria can be assessed based on declarative as well as
experiential information.
INTUITIONS OF TRUTH AND BEAUTY 19
A claim is more likely to seem true when it is compatible with other things one knows.
Whether this is the case can be evaluated by checking the information against one’s knowledge,
an elaborative strategy that requires motivation and time (Petty & Cacioppo, 1986). A less
demanding indicator is provided by processing fluency. When something is incompatible with
one’s beliefs, it makes one stumble -- it takes longer to read and is harder to make sense of
(Taber & Lodge, 2006; Winkielman et al., 2012). It also elicits a negative affective response, as
shown in research on cognitive consistency (e.g., Festinger, 1957). Accordingly, one’s processing
experience and affective response can serve as valid but fallible indicators of whether a
proposition is likely to be at odds with other things one believes.
A given claim is also more likely to be accepted as true when it fits a broader story that
lends coherence to its elements, as observed in research on mental models (for a review, see
Johnson-Laird, 2012) and analyses of jury decision making (Pennington & Hastie, 1993).
Coherence can be determined through a systematic analysis of the relationships between
different pieces of declarative information or by attending to one’s processing experience:
coherent stories are easier to process than stories with internal contradictions (Johnson-Laird,
2012), which makes ease of processing a valid but fallible indicator of coherence. Hence, people
draw on their fluency experience when they evaluate how well things “go together” (Topolinski,
2012), as observed in judgments of semantic coherence (Topolinski & Strack, 2008, 2009) and
syllogistic reasoning (Morsanyi & Handley, 2012).
Claims are also more likely to be accepted as true when they come from a credible and
trustworthy source. As decades of persuasion research illustrate, evaluations of source credibility
can be based on declarative information that bears, for example, on the communicator’s
INTUITIONS OF TRUTH AND BEAUTY 20
expertise, education, achievement, or institutional affiliation and the presence or absence of
conflicting interests (for a review, see Eagly & Chaiken, 1993). But intuitive judgments of
trustworthiness and credibility can also be based on feelings of familiarity elicited by incidental
fluency variables, such as an easy-to-pronounce name (Newman et al., 2014; Silva et al., 2017),
easy to understand accent (Lev-Ari & Keysar, 2010) or high-quality audio (Newman & Schwarz,
2018).
To assess the likely truth of a claim, people also consider whether others believe it – if
many people agree, there’s probably something to it. This social consensus (Festinger, 1950,
1954) or social proof (Cialdini, 2009) criterion is central to many social influence processes.
People are more confident in their beliefs if they are shared by others (e.g., Newcomb, 1943),
more likely to endorse a message if many others have done so before (Cialdini, 2009), and place
more trust in what they remember if others’ memories converge (e.g., Ross, Buehler, & Karr,
1998). Conversely, perceiving dissent undermines message acceptance, which makes reports on
real or fabricated controversies an efficient strategy for swaying public opinion (Lewandowsky
et al., 2012). People often assess consensus by relying on processing fluency, which gives
incidental fluency variables the power to shift perceptions of public opinion (Weaver et al.,
2007).
Finally, people’s confidence in a belief increases with the amount of supporting evidence.
Support can be assessed through an external search, as in a scientific literature review, or through
recall of pertinent information from memory. In either case, the more evidence there is, the easier
it should be to find some. This lay theory is at the heart of Tversky and Kahneman’s (1973)
availability heuristic. Unfortunately, supportive information may easily come to mind because it
INTUITIONS OF TRUTH AND BEAUTY 21
has been endlessly repeated or is very vivid and memorable, making support seem strong for the
wrong reason. Moreover, attention to what comes to mind and attention to the ease with which it
comes to mind will often lead to different conclusions (as discussed in section 2.4). On the one
hand, reliance on the substantive arguments brought to mind results in higher confidence the
more arguments one retrieves or generates. On the other hand, reliance on ease of recall results in
lower confidence the more arguments one tries to come up with because finding many arguments
is difficult (e.g., Haddock et al., 1999; for reviews, see Schwarz, 1998, 2004).
These truth criteria give fluently processed information numerous advantages. When the
truth is judged based on experiential rather than declarative information, fluently processed
claims feel more familiar, more compatible with one’s beliefs, more internally consistent, more
widely held, better supported, and more likely to have come from a credible source.
3.2 Enhancing Perceived Truth
This analysis predicts that any variable that facilitates fluent processing will increase the
perceived truth of a claim, unless perceivers become aware of the incidental nature of the fluency
experience (section 2.3) or other variables encourage analytic processing (section 2.3). The
available evidence is consistent with this prediction.
3.2.1 Repetition. Stimulated by the wisdom of demagogues, the most extensively studied
fluency variable in this domain is message repetition (for a meta-analysis, see Dechêne et al.,
2010). Since Hasher and colleagues (1977) provided experimental evidence that repetition of a
claim increases its later acceptance as true, this “illusory truth effect” has been replicated across
many domains, from trivia statements (Bacon, 1979) to marketing claims (Hawkins & Hoch,
1992) and political beliefs (Arkes et al., 1989). Moreover, it has been obtained with time delays
INTUITIONS OF TRUTH AND BEAUTY 22
between exposure and judgment ranging from minutes (Begg & Armour, 1991) to months
(Brown & Nix, 1996). Repetition effects are even observed among people who know that the
claim is false -- if only they thought about it more carefully (Fazio et al., 2015). For example,
repeating the claim that “The Atlantic Ocean is the largest ocean on Earth” increases its
acceptance even among people who know that the Pacific is larger.
Importantly, illusory truth effects do not require previous exposure to the exact claim that
one is evaluating. Instead, turns of phrase that are familiar from other contexts can facilitate the
processing of a substantively novel claim, making the new claim feel familiar and true (Y. C.
Zhang & Schwarz, 2020). Hence, claims composed of phrases that co-occur more frequently in
the corpus of language are more likely to be believed (Y.C. Zhang & Schwarz, 2020). Worse,
even exposing people to true information can increase the likelihood that they later accept a
superficially similar, but substantively incompatible, statement as true (Garcia-Marques et al.,
2015). When tested immediately, participants who had been told that “crocodiles sleep with their
eyes closed” were less likely to accept the opposite claim (“crocodiles sleep with their eyes
open”) as true than participants who had never heard about the sleep habits of crocodiles. One
week later, however, participants who had heard about crocodiles were more likely to endorse
either claim as true than those who had not heard about crocodiles. Put simply, as the details fade
from memory, even information that contradicts a claim can seem more familiar than information
one has never heard of. After a few days pass, people are also more likely to accept a claim as
true the more often they have been told that it is false (Skurnik et al., 2005). Unfortunately, older
consumers are particularly vulnerable to this effect, reflecting age-related memory impairment
(Skurnik et al., 2011).
INTUITIONS OF TRUTH AND BEAUTY 23
The impact of repetition is attenuated, but not eliminated, when people are warned that
some of the claims they are about to see will be false (Jalbert et al., 2020). However, such
warnings only reduce illusory truth effects when they precede exposure to the claims -- warning
people after they have seen the claims has no discernable influence (Jalbert et al., 2020). Illusory
truth effects are also attenuated when people are in a sad mood (Koch & Forgas, 2012),
consistent with the observation that perceiving one’s current situation as problematic privileges
reliance on declarative inputs (section 2.4).
3.2.2 Other Fluency Manipulations. If repetition effects are driven by changes in
processing fluency, any other variable that facilitates processing should similarly enhance the
perceived truthfulness of a claim. In a first test of this implication, Reber and Schwarz (1999)
found that a given claim (e.g., “Orsono is a city in Chile”) was more likely to be accepted as true
when the color contrast of the presentation made it easy rather than difficult to read. Subsequent
research provided converging evidence, from the influence of print fonts and color contrast (e.g.,
Garcia-Marques, Silva, & Mello, 2016; Parks & Toth, 2006; Reber & Schwarz, 1999; Silva et al.,
2016) to accent (Lev-Ari & Keysar, 2010), audio quality (Newman & Schwarz, 2018), and
rhyme (McGlone & Tofighbakhsh, 2000). Even a photo without any probative value can increase
acceptance of a statement (Newman, Garry, Bernstein, Kantner, & Lindsay, 2012), provided the
photo makes it easier to imagine what the statement is about (for a comprehensive review, see
Newman & L. Zhang, 2020). When the photo impairs fluent processing of the statement it
decreases its acceptance (L. Zhang et al., 2021).
These diverse manipulations share that they influence the fluency of processing the target
claim. Going beyond these observations, Oyserman and colleagues (for a review, see Oyserman,
INTUITIONS OF TRUTH AND BEAUTY 24
2019) exposed participants to culturally disfluent materials (e.g., pictures of a wedding where the
bride and groom were dressed in purple) that were unrelated to any of their specific tasks. They
found that cultural disfluency decreased intuitive processing (Mourey et al., 2015) and the
acceptance of inherence claims (Lin et al., 2019), consistent with the assumption that cultural
disfluency provides a problem signal that fosters systematic processing (section 2.4.2).
3.2.3 When Fluency Signals Falsity. As discussed in section 2.2.2, what people
conclude from their metacognitive experience depends on which of several applicable lay
theories they apply. Applicable lay theories can be learned in context (e.g., when experimenters
associate a particular color contrast with statements that are clearly marked as true or false and
teach participants this association over the course of many trials). Under such conditions,
participants infer that statements presented in the respective format are false, even if they can be
processed fluently (e.g., Silva et al., 2016; Unkelbach, 2007). This effect is specific to the
learned association and does not reliably generalize to other fluency manipulations (Silva et al.,
2016). We also surmise that it is limited to the experimental context in which it has been learned
and does not generalize beyond the experiment. Presumably, simply telling participants that in
the present experiment, all statements presented in this format are false would have the same
effect.
More important, Corneille et al. (2020) showed that repetition-induced fluency can
increase the likelihood that a claim is considered “fake news”. In their experiments, participants
were asked, “Do you believe that this statement has been previously used as Fake News on social
media?” (Corneille et al., 2020, p. 3). As expected, participants were more likely to believe so
when the statement felt familiar due to earlier exposures. This effect was only observed when the
INTUITIONS OF TRUTH AND BEAUTY 25
task conveyed that familiarity may be indicative of social media exposure to fake news; without
that framing, participants judged repeated statements as true, replicating the otherwise observed
relationship.
3.3 Summary
In sum, the criteria of compatibility, coherence, consensus, source credibility, and support
figure prominently in lay assessments of truth (Schwarz, 2015). In each case, processing is less
fluent when the criterion is not met. This makes processing fluency a valid but fallible indicator
of the extent to which a claim satisfies the criteria. Because people are more sensitive to their
metacognitive experience than to the source of their experience, incidental fluency manipulations
can reliably affect people’s perceptions of truth, leading them to accept false statements simply
because they are easy to process. While we assume that these criteria guide truth judgment in
most situations, other criteria and lay theories can be brought to bear. Thus, a statement’s
apparent familiarity can also suggest that it may be fake news that has been spread on social
media (Corneille et al., 2020). As emphasized in section 2.2., metacognitive experiences provide
information and what people conclude from that information depends on which lay theory they
apply (Schwarz, 2004).
3.4 Implications for Social Media and Public Opinion
The reviewed work bears on the efficiency of social media in spreading misinformation
and the failure of many interventions in correcting misinformation. Most social media messages
are short, written in simple language, and presented in optics that are easy to read, which
facilitates fluent processing. These messages are posted by one’s friends, a credible source,
INTUITIONS OF TRUTH AND BEAUTY 26
whose beliefs are usually compatible with one’s own. The messages are liked by other friends,
confirming social consensus, and reposted, ensuring multiple repeated exposures. With each
exposure, processing becomes easier and perceptions of consensus, coherence and compatibility
increase. Comments and related posts provide additional supporting evidence and further
enhance familiarity. At the same time, the accumulating likes and reposts ensure that the filtering
mechanism of the feed makes exposure to opposing information less and less likely. The result is
an information diet that feels increasingly “true”, fostering a high sense of expertise and
confidence, which contributes to what Ross and Ward (1996) described as “naïve realism” – the
belief that the world is the way I see it and whoever disagrees is either ill-informed or
ill-intentioned.
Public information campaigns usually aim to correct false beliefs by confronting them
with facts, consistent with content-focused theories of message learning. Unfortunately, only a
small segment of the population will care enough to engage with the details, which will quickly
fade from memory. Under such conditions, correction attempts may spread misleading
information to audiences who may otherwise not have been exposed to it but will now find the
false claims a bit easier to process when they hear them again. This way, the attempt to correct
the erroneous beliefs of a few may prepare numerous others to accept those beliefs through
repeated exposure (Schwarz et al., 2007). Hence, repeating false information is almost always a
bad idea and better correction strategies involve making the truth as fluent as possible (for
recommendations, see Schwarz, Newman, & Leach, 2016).
INTUITIONS OF TRUTH AND BEAUTY 27
The observed role of fluency in intuitive judgments of truth also explains why poets and
scientists alike have proposed that truth and beauty are closely related. We next turn to beauty
and discuss its relationship to truth in section 4.3.
4 Fluency and Beauty: Aesthetic Appreciation, Pleasure, and Engagement
Inspired by Titchener’s (1910) hypothesis of the “warm glow” of familiarity and Zajonc’s
(1968) demonstration of mere exposure effects, Reber and colleagues (1998) identified
processing fluency as the underlying variable. A subsequent review (Reber et al., 2004) traced
the operation of all variables known to influence aesthetic pleasure to ease of processing and
proposed what became known as the fluency theory of beauty. The observed impact of fluent
processing may reflect that familiar things seem less risky and/or that fluent processing elicits
positive affect (section 2.21). The relationship between familiarity and positive affect is
bidirectional – familiar things elicit more positive affect (e.g. Zajonc, 1968) and positive affect
makes novel things seem more familiar (e.g., Claypool et al., 2008; Garcia-Marques et al., 2004).
4.1 Flavors of Aesthetic Appreciation: Beauty Emerges from the Perceiver’s Processing
Experience
Scholarly debate in philosophy and arts has located beauty either in the beholden,
emphasizing attributes of the object, or in the beholder, emphasizing attributes of the perceiver
(for reviews, see Feagin, 1995; Tatarkiewicz, 1970). The objectivist approach to aesthetics
motivated empirical research programs that aimed to identify objective features responsible for
aesthetic appeal, predominantly in the visual domain (Arnheim, 1974; Fechner, 1876; Solso,
1994). The most prominent among them are simplicity, symmetry, balance, clarity, contrast, and
INTUITIONS OF TRUTH AND BEAUTY 28
proportions. More recent research proposed additional candidates, such as prototypicality or
averageness of the form (e.g., Halberstadt & Rhodes, 2000; Langlois & Roggman, 1990;
Martindale, 1984). The subjectivist view emphasized that beauty is in the eye of the beholder and
assigned a crucial role to the perceiver’s exposure history, expertise, and cultural taste (for
discussions, see Tatarkiewicz, 1970; Kubovy, 1999). Drawing on these traditions, other
philosophical analyses (e.g., Ingarden, 1985; Merleau-Ponty, 1964) have taken an interactionist
perspective and suggested that beauty emerges from the way perceivers and objects relate (for
diverse approaches, see the contributions in Levinson, 2003).
Reviewing findings from the objectivist and subjectivist traditions, Reber and colleagues
(2004) noted that the key variables identified in both traditions share one feature: they are likely
to facilitate processing of the stimulus. Building on that observation, they proposed that an object
is perceived as pretty and pleasing when it is fluently processed, which is a function of stimulus,
perceiver, and context variables. Their fluency theory of beauty emphasizes aesthetic pleasure
and liking as measures of beauty, integrates previously identified object and perceiver variables,
and predicts a role for numerous incidental variables that would otherwise not be considered
relevant to aesthetic experience (section 4.1.1). Their approach did not address aesthetic interest
and engagement; for example, a photo of a pleasant sunset would qualify as eliciting aesthetic
pleasure despite eliciting little intellectual interest and having limited artistic value. Turning to
the role of fluency in aesthetic interest and engagement, Graf and Landwehr (2015) proposed a
dual-process model that follows Reber et al.’s (2004) theory for the experience of aesthetic
pleasure and suggests a more processing-intensive path for the experience of aesthetic interest
and engagement (section 5.2). Note that both of these theories pertain to the aesthetic experience
INTUITIONS OF TRUTH AND BEAUTY 29
of the perceiver; they do not address artistic value, as assessed by art experts (for discussions of
aesthetic vs. artistic value, see Imgarden, 1964; Lopes, 2011; Stecker, 2012).
4.1.1 Aesthetic Pleasure. The fluency theory of beauty (Reber et al., 2004) assumes that
objects are perceived as pleasing when they are easy to process. Relevant stimulus variables
include the object attributes familiar from experimental aesthetics, from contrast to the Gestalt
laws (for a review, see Arnheim, 1974). The perceiver variables include the perceiver’s sensory
abilities, exposure history, and chronically or temporarily accessible applicable knowledge. The
context variables include a wide range of mostly incidental influences, from the immediate
context in which a stimulus is presented to its compatibility with culturally shared metaphors and
the collocation frequency of related concepts in the corpus of natural language. We first revisit
the classic mere exposure effect (Zajonc, 1968), note the many variants of repetition experienced
in daily life, and address important moderators (section 4.1.1.1). Subsequently, we turn to
fluency variables that have received less attention, including metaphor matching (section 4.1.1.2)
and knowledge accessibility (section 4.1.1.3).
4.1.1.1 Stimulus Repetition: Variants of Mere Exposure. Challenging the learning
theories of the time, Zajonc (1968) observed that the more often participants saw a novel
stimulus, the more appealing they found it even in the absence of any reinforcement. This mere
exposure effect has been obtained with a variety of stimuli, including ideographs and words (e.g.,
Zajonc, 1968), faces (e.g., Zebrowitz et al., 2008), music (e.g., Peretz et al., 1998; Ward et al.,
2014), and works of art (e.g., Cutting, 2003); it can be captured with measures of judgment,
choice, and physiological response (for an early meta-analysis, see Bornstein, 1989). Its
emergence does not require stimulus recognition (Janiszewski, 1993; Kunst-Wilson & Zajonc,
INTUITIONS OF TRUTH AND BEAUTY 30
1980). Mere exposure effects are undermined when presentation frequency is salient (Bornstein
& D’Agostino, 1992) or perceivers are induced to misattribute the positive affective response
elicited by fluent processing to an irrelevant source (Fang et al., 2007).
The observed relationship between familiarity and positive affect is bidirectional: familiar
objects elicit a positive affective response that informs their evaluation and novel objects seem
more familiar when the perceiver feels good. For example, familiar (previously seen) faces are
perceived as happier (Claypool et al., 2007), just as happily smiling faces are perceived as more
familiar (Garcia-Marques et al., 2004). This warm glow of familiarity (Titchener, 1910) is not
limited to the previously seen stimulus itself but also informs judgments of related stimuli. For
example, exposure to other-race faces increases subsequent liking for new faces from the same
racial group (Zebrowitz et al., 2008). Previous exposure to a face also influences the evaluation
of products associated with the face. For example, Cho and Schwarz (2010) asked participants to
evaluate eyewear or earrings displayed on the regular or mirror image of a familiar or unfamiliar
other. When the person in the image was another student from the same small class, participants
evaluated the products more favorably, and reported a higher purchase intention, when they were
displayed on the person’s regular image (which they had encountered in class) than on the
person’s mirror image (which they had not encountered in class). Image format exerted no
influence when the person in the image was unfamiliar, thus giving neither image a mere
exposure advantage (see also Cho & Schwarz, 2012).
Several moderators of mere exposure effects are worth noting. As discussed in section
2.3, people are more sensitive to changes in fluency than to a steady signal; hence, fluency
effects are more reliably obtained in within-participant than in between-participant designs
INTUITIONS OF TRUTH AND BEAUTY 31
(Wänke & Hansen, 2015). This also holds for the mere exposure effect, which can only be
observed when previously encountered and novel stimuli are mixed at the time of measurement
(Dechêne et al., 2009). The implications of this regularity for displaying art works and consumer
products in a way that maximizes appreciation are obvious and await empirical exploration in
natural settings.
Moreover, affect and cognition research has shown that people are more likely to explore
novel and unfamiliar ideas and environments in contexts they consider benign than in contexts
they consider problematic. Because benign contexts are usually associated with (mildly) positive
feelings, whereas problematic contexts are usually associated with a shift to negative feelings,
changes in feeling play a key role in informing people about the likely nature of their current
situation (for a review, see Schwarz, 2002). One may therefore expect that a preference for the
familiar is particularly pronounced when negative feelings signal a problematic situation but
attenuated when positive feelings signal a benign situation. Empirically, this is the case. De Vries
and her colleagues (2010) found that participants in an experimentally induced sad mood liked
easy-to-process prototypical objects (dot patterns) more than less prototypical ones. However,
this preference for the familiar (prototypical) was not observed when participants were put into a
happy mood. Using a subliminal mere exposure paradigm, Gillebaart and colleagues (2012)
similarly observed that familiar targets were liked more than novel targets under conditions of
prevention motivation, but not under conditions of promotion motivation.
Note, however, that these findings do not imply that a problematic situation will always
invite an endorsement of the familiar. The participants in the above studies (DeVries et al., 2010;
Gillebaart et al., 2012) made inconsequential liking judgments for stimuli that offered little
INTUITIONS OF TRUTH AND BEAUTY 32
substantive information – dot patterns and letter strings. When the task offers meaningful
declarative information as an alternative input, people may turn to that information at the
expense of experiential information as reviewed in section 2.4. For example, the problem signal
provided by a sad mood can shift people from relying on ease of recall to relying on recalled
content in reasoning tasks (Ruder & Bless, 2003) and can reduce the impact of repetition on
judgments of truth (Koch & Forgas, 2012). Understanding how the perception of one’s current
situation as benign or problematic affects the use of metacognitive experiences for different
judgment tasks provides an important agenda for future research.
4.1.1.2 Beyond Mere Exposure. From a fluency perspective, repeated exposure is just
one of many variables that influence processing fluency. Hence, any other fluency enhancing
variable should similarly enhance aesthetic appreciation, paralleling our discussion of repetition
effects on judgments of truth (section 3.2.1). Empirically, this is the case (for a review, see Reber
et al., 2004). For example, priming participants with the contour of an object facilitates its
identification (as indexed by faster reaction times) and enhances liking (Reber et al., 1998).
Adopting this priming procedure, Forster and colleagues (2013, 2016) aimed to shed light on the
relative contributions of objective fluency (response speed) and its subjective experience
(measured with, “How easy was the perception of the presented stimulus?”) on liking. They
found that “objectively more fluent images were indeed judged as more fluent and were also
liked more. Moreover, differences in liking were even stronger when data were analyzed
according to felt fluency” rather than objective fluency (Forster et al., 2013, p. 280).
Semantic primes can serve the same function. For example, people like ambiguous
drawings (e.g., of a lock) more when they are preceded by a semantic prime (e.g., the word
INTUITIONS OF TRUTH AND BEAUTY 33
“key”) that facilitates perception (Winkielman et al., 2003). Building on this observation, Belke
and colleagues (2010) presented paintings with bogus titles that either facilitated or impaired
processing. Compared to a condition without titles, titles that facilitated the processing of
representational paintings increased appreciation of the art relative to a condition without titles,
whereas titles that impaired the processing of representational paintings hurt appreciation.
However, titles are less likely to facilitate the processing of abstract paintings and do not reliably
affect the pleasure derived from them (e.g., Leder et al., 2006). Similar findings have been found
in the consumer research domain. For example, a bottle of wine is more appealing when its label
contains visual elements (e.g., a picture of a frog) that is compatible with a concept (e.g., frog)
they were asked to visualize earlier, in an ostensibly unrelated task (Labroo et al., 2008).
How fluently a given stimulus can be processed also depends on what the perceiver
attempts to do with the stimulus. Suppose, for example, that the target object is a picture of a
human face with an ambiguous emotional expression. When asked to distinguish between
pictures that show a human face and pictures that do not, the ambiguity of the face’s emotional
expression will not interfere with the task, but when asked to distinguish between pictures that
show a happy or a sad face, ambiguity of emotional expression will make the task more difficult.
Accordingly, the ambiguity of facial expression should affect how appealing one finds the
picture in the latter case, but not in the former. Winkielman and colleagues (2015) found
consistent support for this prediction. In their experiments, the same target seemed more
attractive (and more trustworthy) the more the categorization task allowed for fluent processing.
As a final example, we consider a special type of repetition, namely the repetitiveness of
the lyrics of popular songs. Analyzing the role of lyrics in the popularity of songs, Nunes and
INTUITIONS OF TRUTH AND BEAUTY 34
colleagues (2015) found that lexical repetition (e.g., “a good song is a good song is a good
song”) increases the ease with which lyrics can be processed. This, in turn, benefits the
popularity of the songs. Using data from Billboard’s Hot 100 singles chart from 1958–2012,
Nunes and colleagues (2015) showed that more repetitive songs were more likely to reach #1,
and did so in a shorter time, than less repetitive songs.
4.1.1.3 Metaphor Congruency Effects. The priming studies reviewed in the preceding
section showed that a target object is easier to process when it is preceded by matching rather
than mismatching visual (e.g., Reber et al., 1998) or semantic (e.g., Belke et al., 2010;
Winkielman et al., 2003) primes. We surmise that the same principle underlies a broad range of
congruency effects as a discussion of metaphor-congruency may illustrate.
Conceptual metaphors ground abstract concepts in concrete domains with which people
have direct sensory experience (Lakoff & Johnson, 1999; for reviews, see Landau, 2017;
Schwarz & Lee, 2019). For example, we talk about valence in terms of verticality, feel “down”
or “on top of the world”, and look “up” to good people but “down” at bad ones. As Meier and
colleagues (2004) showed, valenced words are processed faster and with fewer errors when their
spatial display matches the metaphorical valence-verticality link, giving positive words an
advantage when presented at the top of the screen and negative words when presented at the
bottom of the screen. According to fluency theory, this difference in processing fluency should
translate into differential aesthetic appreciation. To test this prediction, L. Zhang and colleagues
(2022) presented pairs of happy and sad faces in a visual arrangement that matched (happy face
above sad face) or mismatched (sad face above happy face) the valence-verticality metaphor. As
expected, metaphor congruent arrangements were strongly preferred (for details, see Chapter 3 of
INTUITIONS OF TRUTH AND BEAUTY 35
this dissertation). Verticality also figures prominently in metaphorical distinctions between
rationality and emotionality, reflecting that the head (rationality) is above the gut (emotionality;
for a review, see Cian et al., 2015). Consistent with this metaphor, consumers prefer
arrangements where rational materials are placed above emotional materials (Cian et al., 2015).
Other experiments relied on the relationship between time and space – people look
“ahead” to the future, but “back” to the past (Boroditsky, 2000; Tenbrink, 2011). In
two-dimensional space, the past precedes the future in the direction of writing; e.g., for speakers
of English, the past is to the left of the future. As expected, American participants preferred pairs
of historic and modern photos that matched the space-time metaphor over pairs that did not when
asked to select the better arrangement (L. Zhang et al., 2022). The benefits of space-time
matching also extend to the evaluation of consumer products. Chae and Hoegg (2013) presented
advertisements for self-improvement products (e.g., a weight loss program) with before-after
pictures that illustrated the efficiency of the product. English-speaking consumers evaluated the
product more favorably when the before-image was placed to the left of the after-picture than
when the ordering was reversed. English-speaking consumers also evaluated antique furnishings
more favorably when displayed on the left, but modern furnishings when displayed on the right;
this preference reversed for Hebrew speakers, who write from right to left.
4.2 Aesthetic Interest and Engagement
Whereas the fluency theory of beauty (Reber et al., 2004) predicts that aesthetic
appreciation increases with ease of processing, other theories predict that aesthetic appreciation
is most pronounced at medium levels of complexity (e.g., Berlyne, 1970; Hekkert et al., 2003),
which entails a relationship between fluency and appreciation that follows an inverted U-shape.
INTUITIONS OF TRUTH AND BEAUTY 36
The empirical results are mixed and support for both predictions has been obtained. One
contributor to the mixed findings are individual differences in preference for complexity
(Güçlütürk et al., 2016), which can reflect differences in expertise and cognitive capacity. Not
surprisingly, complex stimuli become easier to process as domain expertise and previous
exposure increases (e.g., Smith & Melara, 1990; for a review, see Reber et al., 2004). Complex
stimuli are also easier to process when cognitive capacity is high, as Sherman and colleagues
(2015) observed. Using a sample of 120 visual artworks from different periods, cultures, and
styles, they found that “art appreciation is increased when the level of visual complexity within
an artwork is compatible with the viewer’s visual working memory capacity” (Sherman et al.,
2015, p. 898). A second contributor to the mixed findings is that not all complex stimuli are
difficult to process. Some have a high degree of internal repetition, which leads to more fluent,
rather than disfluent, processing (Joye et al., 2016). This is compatible with an influential view in
aesthetic theorizing that holds that beauty is attained through “simplicity in complexity” (Dickie,
1997) as well as the observation that fluency experiences are context-sensitive, with a given
familiar stimulus seeming more attractive when presented in the context of novel ones (Dechêne
et al., 2009). Moreover, perceivers who enjoy complex abstract artworks, imposing low visual
fluency, may only do so when they can easily understand them, that is, when they experience
high conceptual fluency (Ball et al., 2018).
Complicating this picture is a lack of agreement on what aesthetic appreciation entails.
Whereas Reber and colleagues (2004) emphasized aesthetic pleasure and liking, other
approaches emphasize interest, engagement, and assessments of originality and creativity as
components of aesthetic experience. Not surprisingly, different judgment tasks result in different
INTUITIONS OF TRUTH AND BEAUTY 37
outcomes. For example, a fluently processed work of art may be judged as pleasing and beautiful
based on the elicited affect, but may simultaneously seem too familiar to qualify as original and
creative, paralleling the observation that fluently processed products seem less innovative (e.g.,
Cho & Schwarz, 2006). Testing this possibility, Christensen and colleagues (2019) obtained
mixed results across seven experiments with different fluency manipulations. Easy processing
increased judgments of beauty as well as creativity when fluency was manipulated through
exposure frequency or figure-ground contrast, whereas high prototypicality increased judgments
of beauty without influencing judgments of creativity. A positive effect of disfluency on
judgments of creativity was only observed when fluency was manipulated through stimulus
complexity, a variable that had inconsistent effects on judgments of beauty. Such divergences are
to be expected when judgments of beauty are based on the affective response to the stimulus (as
reviewed in section 4.1.1.1) but judgments of creativity on the perceived originality of the
stimulus. Moreover, the observation that perceived creativity increased with stimulus complexity
does not necessarily implicate (dis)fluency as the key driver. Stimuli of different complexity also
differ on dimensions unrelated to ease of processing, which makes it important to use
manipulations of complexity that reduce the range of possible alternative accounts. At present,
the ambiguity of complexity manipulations applies to most studies that suggest an inverted
U-shape relationship between fluency and beauty based on Berlyne’s (1970) theorizing.
Motivated by these issues, Graf and Landwehr (2015, 2017) presented a dual-process
perspective on fluency-based aesthetics, the pleasure-interest model of aesthetic liking (PIA).
Their model follows Reber et al.’s (2004) predictions for conditions of low processing
motivation or ability but assumes that disfluency will elicit interest under conditions of high
INTUITIONS OF TRUTH AND BEAUTY 38
processing motivation and ability. From this perspective, perceivers who lack motivation or
cognitive resources prefer fluent stimuli, which perceivers with high motivation and cognitive
resources may find boring. We consider these assumptions plausible and compatible with
findings in other areas of metacognitive research. Initial tests of the model support the prediction
that well-ordered and easy to process patterns are liked more, whereas stimuli that require effort
to detect order elicit interest (Muth et al., 2019). Similarly, Flavell and colleagues (2020)
observed that camouflaged objects were liked more when they were easy to identify, but
evaluated as more interesting when they were hard to identify.
4.3 Beauty and Truth
From a poet’s assertion that “beauty is truth, truth beauty” (Keats, 1820) to a Nobel Prize
winning scientist’s claim that “you can recognize truth by its beauty and simplicity” (Feinman,
1981), beauty has often been offered as a heuristic for assessing truth. The intuitive appeal of this
heuristic reflects that the same metacognitive experience of fluency can serve as input into both
judgments (Schwarz, 2006). Indeed, the same fluency manipulations can increase the perceived
beauty of an object as well as the perceived truth of a claim, as reviewed in sections 3 and 4. In a
recent test of this assumption, Kara-Yakoubian and colleagues (2020) presented substantively
equivalent claims in the aesthetically pleasing form of an antimetabole, that is, an A-B-B-A
pattern (e.g., “Success is what you want. Happiness is what you get.”) or a less pleasing form of
equivalent semantic meaning (e.g., “Success is getting what you wish. Happiness is wanting
what you get.”). As expected, the aesthetically more pleasing forms were processed faster
(indicating higher objective fluency) and rated as more accurate descriptions of human behavior.
INTUITIONS OF TRUTH AND BEAUTY 39
Similarly, McGlone and Tofighbakhsh (2000) found that substantively equivalent statements
were judged as truer when they rhymed than when they did not.
Going beyond the numerous observations of parallel effects of diverse fluency
manipulations on judgments of beauty and judgments of truth, V ogel and colleagues (2020)
explored how repetition and figure-ground contrast influence these judgments when both types
of fluency are manipulated simultaneously. Their repetition manipulation consisted of exposure
to an initial statement (e.g., “The second of Gulliver’s travels led to Brobdingnag.”) that was
repeated in paraphrased form at test (e.g., “Brobdingnag was the second place Gulliver went to in
his journeys.”). Using the paraphrase at test privileges the conceptual component of the fluency
experience, given the differences in surface appearance. In addition, the statements at test were
presented in high or low color contrast, thus manipulating the perceptual component of the
fluency experience. Using these orthogonal manipulations, V ogel and colleagues (2020)
observed an influence of repetition (but not color contrast) on judgments of truth and an
influence of color contrast (but not repetition) on judgments of beauty. They concluded from this
observation that people can differentiate between different sources of fluency and draw on the
more applicable source when two are experienced simultaneously and pitched against one. This
increases the impact of conceptual fluency on judgments of truth and of perceptual fluency on
judgments of beauty. However, when only one source of fluency is present, people draw on this
experience for either judgment, as reviewed in sections 3 and 4.
At present, V ogel and colleagues’ (2020) results are the most persuasive evidence for
judgment-specific effects of different fluency manipulations. That these effects are only observed
when two different sources of fluency are instantiated simultaneously raises new questions about
INTUITIONS OF TRUTH AND BEAUTY 40
how people differentiate between different components of their experience and challenges the
assumption that the phenomenal experience is similar across manipulations. The assumed ability
of easy differentiation between sources of fluency also stands in stark contrast to the core
observation that people misread incidental fluency experiences as bearing on their task and only
discount their experience when their attention is drawn to its incidental nature. Future research
may shed light on these issues.
4.4 Summary
As our selective review of fluency and beauty indicates, the metacognitive experience of
fluent processing is a major determinant of aesthetic pleasure and liking. Variables that have long
been known to be aesthetically pleasing, such as symmetry and contrast, as well as variables that
have not been considered of aesthetic relevance, such as semantic priming and metaphor
congruency, enhance liking by facilitating fluent processing. Throughout, ease of processing
increases, whereas difficulty of processing decreases, aesthetic pleasure as reflected in
self-reports of liking and psychophysiological measures of positive affective response. However,
less fluently processed stimuli may elicit more interest and may seem more original, paralleling
the observation that disfluent products seem more innovative and more suited for special
occasions.
In most cases, these effects can be traced to two closely related variables, namely the
positive affect and/or the sense of familiarity elicited by the processing experience. The
relationship between these variables is bidirectional – familiar stimuli elicit a more positive
affective response (e.g., Monahan et al., 2000), and being in a positive affective state makes
novel stimuli seem more familiar (e.g., Garcia-Marques et al., 2004). This familiarity may in turn
INTUITIONS OF TRUTH AND BEAUTY 41
make fluent things seem less innovative. Depending on the judgment task, familiarity and affect
may exert parallel influences (e.g., on judgments of liking or trust) or opposing influences (e.g.,
when fluent products are rejected because they are not sufficiently unique). The relative
contributions of affect and familiarity could be separated through misattribution manipulations
that target either affect or familiarity, which is a promising avenue for future research. Under
natural conditions, however, both variables are associated and their relative impact will depend
on the specific task at hand.
5 Chapter Summary
Theories of judgment and decision-making usually focus on declarative information, such
as the object attributes people consider or the arguments they generate. However, we cannot
understand the impact of declarative information without considering its interplay with
experiential information, from moods and emotions to bodily sensations and metacognitive
experiences (Schwarz, 2012). Focusing on the metacognitive experiences of ease and difficulty,
the research covered in this chapter paints a mixed portrait of the sophistication of human
judgment. On the one hand, people monitor their own thought processes and attend to declarative
information and the accompanying feelings as relevant sources of information. The inferences
they draw from that information are guided by lay theories of mental processes that are usually
correct and consistent with key results of psychological research. Moreover, the recruitment of
applicable lay theories is context-sensitive and different tasks invite the selection of different
inference rules, which are usually appropriate. On the other hand, people are insensitive to where
their metacognitive experiences come from and tend to take their feelings at face value. Unless
INTUITIONS OF TRUTH AND BEAUTY 42
their attention is explicitly drawn to it, they routinely fail to recognize the influence of incidental
variables (from print fonts and figure-ground contrast to rhyme) and treat their experience as
integral to their task, much as has been observed for the influence of moods and other feelings.
As a result, experiential information figures prominently in impressive feats of human insight as
well as utter disasters of gullibility.
INTUITIONS OF TRUTH AND BEAUTY 43
Chapter 2 - Truthiness: How Photos Influence Perceived Truth
2
Chapter Preface
Claims are more likely to be judged true when presented with a related photo, even if the
photo does not provide any evidence for the claim (Newman, Garry, Bernstein, Kantner, &
Lindsay, 2012). According to a processing fluency account, related photos facilitate processing
and easy processing fosters acceptance of the claim. Alternatively, according to an
illusion-of-evidence account, related photos may increase acceptance of the claim because they
are treated as tentative supportive evidence. Chapter 2 is an empirical paper (L. Zhang et al.,
2021) that disentangles these potential mechanisms by using comparative claims.
In forming comparative judgments, people first assess attributes of the linguistic subject
of comparison and subsequently compare them to attributes of the referent (Tversky, 1977).
Hence, photos of the linguistic subject in a sentence should facilitate, but photos of the linguistic
referent impair, fluent processing of this sequence. In contrast, a photo of either the subject or the
referent can be perceived as tentative evidence. In two experiments (total N = 1200), photos of
the subject increased acceptance of comparative claims relative to a no-photo condition (a
truthiness effect), but only when the subject was otherwise difficult to visualize. Photos of the
referent decreased acceptance of comparative claims relative to a no-photo condition (a falsiness
effect), but only when the subject of comparison was otherwise easy to visualize. All results are
consistent with a context-sensitive fluency account: increases in fluency foster, and decreases in
2
Chapter 2 is adapted from Zhang, L., Newman, E. J., & Schwarz, N. (2021). When photos
backfire: Truthiness and falsiness effects in comparative judgments. Journal of Experimental
Social Psychology, 92, 104054. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jesp.2020.104054
INTUITIONS OF TRUTH AND BEAUTY 44
fluency impair, acceptance of a claim as true. The results provide no support for an
illusion-of-evidence account.
1 Chapter Introduction
The liquid metal inside a thermometer is magnesium. Without consulting external
sources, most people will not know whether this statement is true or false. Previous research
found that statements of this type are more likely to be accepted as true when they are
accompanied by a nonprobative photo of the subject of the claim, here a thermometer (Newman,
Garry, Bernstein, Kantner, & Lindsay, 2012; for a review, see Newman & L. Zhang, 2020).
Although nonprobative photos provide no meaningful evidence that the claims are true, they
produce a sense of “truthiness”, a feeling of truth that is not based on facts but can nevertheless
persist over time (Fenn et al., 2013).
The explanation with the most empirical support is that nonprobative photos can inflate
the truthiness of a claim—regardless of their informational value—by facilitating the conceptual
processing of the claim, making it more vivid and imaginable in the recipient’s mind. Failing to
realize that the metacognitive ease arises from an irrelevant source, the experienced fluency may
convey that the claim “feels right”. Indeed, numerous variables that facilitate ease of
processing—from repetition (e.g., Hasher et al., 1977) to color contrast (e.g., Reber & Schwarz,
1999) and rhyme (e.g., McGlone & Tofighbakhsh, 2000)—have been found to increase
perceived truth (for reviews, see Schwarz, 2015, 2018).
Another possibility that has not been fully ruled out is that nonprobative photos create an
illusion of evidence. This may be the case for several reasons. First, most photos capture real
INTUITIONS OF TRUTH AND BEAUTY 45
events and photos have long been offered as evidence that an event has truly occurred (Mnookin,
1998). Second, photos are rich in perceptual and semantic details, just like real events. Given that
people are more likely to assume that a mental event (e.g., an episodic memory) reflects reality
when it features such details (Johnson et al., 1988), photos may be treated as evidence, consistent
with the familiar claim that “seeing is believing”. Third, from a conversational perspective,
speakers are expected to communicate only information that is relevant to the ongoing
conversation (Grice, 1975; Sperber & Wilson, 1986). People find violations of this relevance
principle unnatural (Davies & Katsos, 2009), and even children as young as three years old are
sensitive to such violations (Eskritt et al., 2010). From this perspective, recipients may perceive
photos that are related to a claim as the speaker’s attempt to offer supportive evidence -- or why
else would the photo be presented? This is particularly likely when the speaker is perceived as a
cooperative and trustworthy communicator, which is usually the case when messages are
presented by a researcher (Schwarz, 1994, 1996). Hence, people may treat nonprobative photos
that accompany a claim as tentative evidence, unless the photo is clearly unrelated to the claim.
When the photo is clearly unrelated, none of the considerations above apply and truthiness
effects are not observed (Newman, Garry, Unkelbach, Bernstein, & Lindsay, 2015).
It is difficult to disentangle the fluency account and the illusion-of-evidence account on
the basis of available research. While many studies identified factors that moderate the truthiness
effect of nonprobative photos -- such as the temporal orientation and valence of the claim
(Newman et al., 2018), one’s background knowledge (Abed et al., 2017; or familiarity, e.g.,
Newman et al., 2012 ), and judgment contexts (Newman et al., 2015) -- few have directly
examined the mechanism(s) underlying truthiness effects. Moreover, both accounts lead to the
INTUITIONS OF TRUTH AND BEAUTY 46
same predictions under most conditions -- any related photo is likely to facilitate processing and
may be seen as tentative supporting evidence. However, these difficulties can be overcome by
testing the influence of nonprobative photos on a type of claim that has so far not received
attention: comparative claims about an unobservable difference between two targets.
1.1 Comparative and Non-comparative Claims
To date, studies have relied on non-comparative claims, such as Turtles are deaf. Such
claims are more likely to be accepted when accompanied by a picture of a turtle, even though the
picture provides no probative information about the turtle’s hearing. This observation is
compatible with a fluency account as well as an illusion-of-evidence account. But these accounts
lead to diverging predictions for comparative claims, such as Turtles have better hearing than
sealions or Sealions have better hearing than turtles. From an illusion-of-evidence perspective, a
photo of a turtle as well as a photo of a sealion might be interpreted as supporting evidence for
either claim. Hence, this account predicts that the influence of a nonprobative photo is
independent of the direction of comparison (here, whether turtles are compared to sealions vs.
sealions to turtles) and the specific target shown in the photo (here, a turtle or a sealion).
In contrast, previous research into the processing of comparative claims (Tversky, 1977; Tversky
& Gati, 1978) suggests that the direction of comparison should influence whether the target
shown in the photo facilitates or impairs fluent processing, resulting in differential effects on the
perceived truth of the associated claim. Evaluating the truth of any comparative claim requires
that the subject of the claim is compared to its referent (e.g., in the claim Turtles have better
hearing than sealions, turtles constitute the subject and sealions the referent). As Tversky (1977;
Tversky & Gati, 1978) demonstrated, the comparison process begins with an assessment of
INTUITIONS OF TRUTH AND BEAUTY 47
features of the subject, which are then checked against features of the referent. Hence, switching
subject and referent results in qualitatively different judgments, such as the memorable
observations that North Korea is judged as being more similar to China than China is to North
Korea (Tversky & Gati, 1978). Similarly, female teachers are judged as more empathetic than
male teachers when they serve as the subject of the comparison, but as less empathetic when they
serve as the referent of the comparison, reflecting that the direction of comparison influences
which features come to represent the attribute “empathetic” (Wänke et al., 1995). Such direction
of comparison effects have been observed in many domains, including person perception (Srull
& Gaelick, 1983), relationship satisfaction (Schwarz & Scheuring, 1989), consumer preference
(Dhar & Simonson, 1992), and public opinion (Wänke et al., 1995; Wänke, 1996). Throughout,
they reflect that comparative statements are about the subject, which is then compared to a
referent. From a fluency perspective, photos of the subject should facilitate a processing
sequence that begins with assessing attributes of the subject, whereas photos of the referent
should impair it. Hence, the fluency account predicts that, relative to a no-photo condition, a
comparative claim is more likely to be accepted as true when it is accompanied by a photo of the
subject of comparison (i.e., a truthiness effect), but less likely to be accepted as true when it is
accompanied by a photo of the referent of comparison (i.e., a falsiness effect).
To date, falsiness effects of nonprobative photos have only been observed when the photo
was clearly unrelated to the claim; for example, when a claim about macadamia nuts appeared
with a photo of a trash can (Newman et al., 2015). This may reflect that the unrelated photo was
not perceived as tentative supportive evidence or that it impaired processing of the claim. This
INTUITIONS OF TRUTH AND BEAUTY 48
ambiguity does not apply in the case of comparative claims, which provide an opportunity to test
whether related photos increase rejection of a claim when they render processing disfluent.
Finally, numerous studies indicate that fluency effects are relative and driven by changes in
fluency rather than the absolute level of fluency (Wänke & Hansen, 2015), which is consistent
with the general observation that people are more sensitive to changes in experience than to
steady states (Berelson & Steiner, 1964). Hence, fluency effects are more reliably observed in
within-participant designs, where the processing experience differs from trial to trial, than in
between-participant designs, where the processing experience for a given participant remains
relatively constant across trials (e.g., Hansen et al., 2008; Newman et al., 2015; Westerman,
2008; for a review, see Wänke & Hansen, 2015). This robust observation suggests that the size of
the expected effects of nonprobative related photos should depend on how easily the targets
within each claim can be processed without photos, and thus the extent to which the addition of
photos changes processing of the claim. This prediction cannot be derived from an
illusion-of-evidence account. For ease of exposition, we elaborate on all predictions in more
detail in the context of the respective experiments.
1.2 Present Research
We tested diverging predictions derived from the fluency and illusion-of-evidence
accounts in two experiments by presenting comparative statements using targets that are either
easy or difficult to process without photos. To identify suitable targets, we drew on imageability
and familiarity ratings in the Medical Research Council Psycholinguistic Database - Version 2.00
(Wilson, 1988), following Newman et al. (2018). We selected commodities that are either high
INTUITIONS OF TRUTH AND BEAUTY 49
or low in both imageability and familiarity (henceforth referred to as high vs. low imageability
conditions).
[1]
The selected commodities were then combined with statements that predicted their
change in market price in three months. To ensure that the items would produce the standard
truthiness effect observed in previous studies, we conducted a preliminary experiment with
noncomparative statements (e.g., Milk [Bhang] will have increased in price in three months). It
showed that nonprobative related photos increase the likelihood that a claim is judged true, in
particular when the targets are unfamiliar and difficult to imagine without a photo (see
Supplementary Materials for details). After establishing that standard truthiness effects can be
obtained with the present materials, we used the materials to generate comparative claims (e.g.,
Milk [Bhang] will have increased more in price than Strawberry [Aster] in three months). For all
studies, we report how we determined the sample size, all data exclusions, all manipulations, and
all measures.
2 Experiment 1: Nonprobative Photos and the Truth of Comparative claims
The criterion for a truthiness or falsiness effect is whether a nonprobative photo increases
or decreases acceptance of the claim as true relative to a no-photo condition, not whether the
acceptance is above or below chance. Hence, all hypotheses pertain to whether a photo increases
or decreases acceptance of a given claim relative to a no-photo condition.
The illusion-of-evidence account predicts (i) that photos of the subject, as well as photos
of the referent, will increase acceptance of a claim as true, (ii) independent of the initial ease of
processing (due to imageability and familiarity) of the subject or referent. In contrast, the fluency
account predicts that photos of the subject and the referent will produce opposite effects on truth
INTUITIONS OF TRUTH AND BEAUTY 50
judgment and that their impact will be moderated by the ease of processing the subject. Because
the processing of comparative claims starts with the subject (Tversky, 1977), a photo of the
subject should facilitate processing of the claim, especially if the subject is otherwise difficult to
imagine. This predicts (iii) that a given comparative claim is more likely to be judged true when
it is presented with a photo of the subject than without a photo. This truthiness effect should (iv)
be more pronounced under conditions of low rather than high imageability, which is compatible
with previous findings that truthiness effects of photos are attenuated when the claims are
already easy to process at baseline (Newman et al., 2012; Abed et al., 2017). In contrast, a photo
of the referent is likely to impair the processing of a comparative claim because the photo
interferes with attending to the subject at the initial stage of processing. Hence, a given
comparative claim should (v) be less likely to be judged true when it is presented with a photo of
the referent than without a photo, resulting in a falsiness effect. This adverse impact of a referent
photo should be more apparent when the subject would have been otherwise easy to imagine
than when the subject is difficult to imagine to begin with. Hence, the predicted falsiness effect
of referent photos should (vi) be more pronounced under conditions of high rather than low
imageability.
These predictions also bear on theoretical issues beyond the effect of nonprobative photos
on assessments of truth. First, with regard to comparative judgment, observing the predicted
differential effects of subject photos and referent photos under conditions of high and low
imageability would further support the notion that comparisons begin with an assessment of the
subject, as initially proposed by Tversky (1977) for judgments of similarity. Second, with regard
to the informational value of fluency experiences, the same pattern of results would provide
INTUITIONS OF TRUTH AND BEAUTY 51
novel data that highlight that fluency effects are relative -- experiencing low fluency due to a
referent photo is less informative when low fluency is already expected from the low
imageability and familiarity of the subject than when it contrasts with the otherwise easy
processing of a highly imageable and familiar subject. Finally, the fluency account predicts that
exposure to related, but nonprobative photos can produce a falsiness effect when they pertain to
the referent. To date, falsiness effects have only been observed for photos that were completely
unrelated to any aspect of the claim with which they were paired (Newman et al., 2015).
2.1 Method
Participants. Since there was no previous study that reported falsiness effects of
nonprobative photos related to the claim, we used the average size (Cohen’s d = .19) of falsiness
effects produced by unrelated photos in Newman et al.’s (2015) within-subject experiments to
estimate the sample size required to capture a falsiness effect, if any, of the referent photos. A
priori power analysis using G*Power (Faul et al., 2007) indicated that 586 participants were
needed for an ANOV A test of repeated measures and a within-between interaction, with alpha =
.05 and power = .90. We posted 600 timeslots on Amazon Mechanical Turk, limiting
participation to participants with United States IP addresses and approval ratings of 95% or
higher for previous HITS. Participants were compensated with $0.60; a total of 603 participants
completed the experiment and no participant was excluded from analysis.
Design. The experiment follows a 3 (photo: subject, referent, no) x 2 (imageability: high,
low) mixed design, with type of photo manipulated within participants and imageability between
participants. We manipulated imageability as a between-subject variable in order to avoid large
INTUITIONS OF TRUTH AND BEAUTY 52
discrepancies in the imageability of the items that participants were asked to compare.
Participants were randomly assigned to either the high or low imageability condition.
Material. Comparative statements were created from the 48 commodities used in the
preliminary study (see Supplementary Materials). By pairing commodities that had the closest
imageability ratings, twelve comparative statements were created for each imageability
condition. The statements had the following structure: [Commodity A] will have increased more
in price than [Commodity B] three months from today. Each statement appeared either with a
photo of commodity A (subject photo condition), a photo of commodity B (referent photo
condition), or no photo (no-photo condition). Each photo had a label that identified the
commodity (see Figure 1.1). The phrase “three months from today” was not repeated in the
experimental phase after the initial instructions.
Imageability was manipulated as a between-subject variable and participants saw either
twelve statements with familiar and easy-to-visualize commodities (high imageability condition)
or twelve statements with unfamiliar and difficult-to-visualize commodities (low imageability
condition). To manipulate photo type as a within-subject variable and to counterbalance the
photo type paired with each statement and the direction of comparison, we created six versions
of each statement for both imageability conditions. For example, the statement Shrimp will have
increased more in price than Roses was paired with a photo of the subject in counterbalance 1,
with a photo of the referent in counterbalance 2, and with no photo in counterbalance 3.
Counterbalance 4-6 repeated this arrangement except that the direction of comparison was
reversed (i.e., the statement became Roses will have increased more in price than Shrimp). The
counterbalance was arranged such that 1) each participant in either imageability conditions only
INTUITIONS OF TRUTH AND BEAUTY 53
saw one version of each statement, and 2) among the twelve statements they saw, four appeared
with a photo of the subject, four appeared with a photo of the referent, and four appeared with no
photo. The order of the twelve statements was randomized. Figure 1.1 gives an example of
different photo types paired with the same statement in both the high and low imageability
conditions.
Figure 1.1. Conceptual examples of different photo types paired with the same statement for both
the high and low imageability conditions. Photo of Betel: Creative Commons License
Attribution: Ananda Cilianuri. Photo of Leghorn: Creative Commons License Attribution:
Naetoru.
INTUITIONS OF TRUTH AND BEAUTY 54
Procedure. The experiment was conducted on Qualtrics. All participants were informed
prior to participation that they must use a computer rather than a smartphone. Those who
connected with a smartphone were automatically identified by Qualtrics and redirected to a page
informing them that they could not participate on a mobile device. This was to ensure that all
participants could see the complete statements and the accompanying photo at the same time.
Participants were informed that they would see statements comparing the prices of
commodities in three months and that each statement would appear either with or without a
photo. They were to decide whether each statement is true or false based on their intuition. They
were then given an example of the statements (e.g., Gold will have increased more in price than
Silver) with and without a photo. After the instructions, participants were randomly assigned to
either the high or low imageability condition. They then made a true/false judgment about each
of the twelve statements by clicking a “true” or “false” button below the statement. Each
statement appeared on a separate page and participants had to click “next” to move to the next
page. At the end, participants were asked to report their native language and whether they had
looked up the commodities online during the study.
2.2 Results
We first calculated the proportion of times participants responded “true” to each claim
across experimental conditions. We then tested the predictions of the illusion-of-evidence
account and fluency account with main effect contrasts between different photo types (subject vs.
referent photo; subject vs. no photo; referent vs. no photo) and simple contrasts of photo type
within each imageability condition. A sensitivity power analysis using G*Power indicates the
INTUITIONS OF TRUTH AND BEAUTY 55
experiment has 80% power to detect a minimum effect size of Cohen’s d = 0.162 or = .0065. To
correct for multiple comparisons, a Bonferroni adjustment was made to the p-values and 95%
confidence intervals. The results of the omnibus analysis of variance and all interactions are
reported in the Supplementary Materials.
The left-hand panel of Figure 1.2 shows the results (see also Table 1). Overall, a given
comparative claim was more likely to be judged true when accompanied by a photo of the
subject than when accompanied by a photo of the referent, F(1, 601) = 38.371, p < .001, = .060,
for the main effect contrast. Photos of the subject increased acceptance of the claim (M = .577,
SD = .266) relative to the no-photo control condition (M = .531, SD = .266) -- a truthiness effect;
F(1, 601) = 8.669, p = .003, = .014, for the main effect contrast. On the other hand, photos of the
referent decreased acceptance of the claim (M = .477, SD = .274) relative to the no-photo
condition -- a falsiness effect; F(1, 601) = 11.212, p = .001, = .018, for the main effect contrast.
These observations are consistent with a fluency account and incompatible with an
illusion-of-evidence account.
INTUITIONS OF TRUTH AND BEAUTY 56
Figure 1.2. Proportion of “true” responses to items that appeared with each photo type. Error
bars represent the 95% confidence intervals for the photo effects.
The fluency account further predicts that the impact of photos is moderated by
imageability. The results support this prediction. As Figure 1.2 shows, the overall truthiness
effect observed for claims presented with a photo of the subject of comparison held in the low
imageability condition, t(300) = 4.246, p < .001, mean difference = .089, 95% CI [.036, .142],
Cohen’s d = .331, but not in the high imageability condition, t(301) = .142, p > .999, mean
difference = .003, 95% CI [-.05, .056], Cohen’s d = 0.013. This is reflected in a significant
interaction of imageability and the main effect contrast between subject- vs. no-photo conditions,
F(1, 601) = 7.468, p = .006, = .012.
Conversely, the overall falsiness effect observed for claims presented with a photo of the
referent of comparison held in the high imageability condition, t(301) = 3.393, p = .002, mean
difference = .079, 95% CI = [.024, .133], Cohen’s d = .292, but not in the low imageability
condition, t(300) = 1.303, p = .606, mean difference = .029, 95% CI [-.026, .084], Cohen’s d =
INTUITIONS OF TRUTH AND BEAUTY 57
.107. However, the interaction between imageability and the referent- vs. no-photo main effect
contrast was not significant, F(1, 601) = 2.375, p = .124, = .004. We address this issue in a
meta-analysis after reporting experiment 2.
2.3 Discussion
Experiment 1 used comparative claims to examine divergent predictions of the
illusion-of-evidence and the fluency account. The obtained results are consistent with a fluency
account and difficult to derive from an illusion-of-evidence account. First, photos of the subject
of comparison resulted in a truthiness effect, whereas photos of the referent of comparison
resulted in a falsiness effect. Both presumably reflect the impact of the photos on the ease of
processing a comparative claim. Because comparisons begin with an assessment of attributes of
the subject, which are then compared with attributes of the referent (Tversky, 1977; Tversky &
Gati, 1978), presenting a photo of the subject facilitates the flow of comparison, resulting in
more fluent processing. In contrast, a photo of the referent disrupts the flow of comparison,
resulting in less fluent processing. As observed for many fluency manipulations--from repetition
(Hasher et al., 1977) and color contrast (Reber & Schwarz, 1999) to rhyme (McGlone &
Tofighbakhsh, 2000)-- fluent processing increases, and disfluent processing decreases, the
acceptance of claims as true (for reviews, see Dechêne et al., 2010; Schwarz, 2018).
Second, consistent with the relative nature of experienced fluency, truthiness and
falsiness effects depended on the change in perceivers’ processing experience. Seeing a photo of
the subject increases ease of processing more when the subject is difficult to imagine without a
photo than when it is easy to imagine to begin with, consistent with previous observations that
truthiness effects are attenuated when claims are already easy to process at base-line (Newman et
INTUITIONS OF TRUTH AND BEAUTY 58
al., 2012; Abed et al., 2017). Hence, photos of the subject enhanced acceptance of the claim
more in the low than in the high imageability condition. Conversely, seeing a photo of the
referent while thinking about the subject should impair experienced fluency more when the
subject is expected to be easy to process than when the subject is expected to be difficult to
process to begin with. Again consistent with the relative nature of the fluency experience, this
was the case -- exposure to a referent photo impaired acceptance of the claim more when the
subject was otherwise easy to imagine than when it was difficult to imagine. We return to the
broader theoretical implications of these findings in the general discussion.
Third, neither the differential effects of subject and referent photos nor their moderation by
imageability is predicted by an illusion-of-evidence account. According to this account, the fact
that a photo is presented as part of the task conveys that the photo is relevant to the task -- or
why else would it be presented? As discussed above, such an account would predict a main effect
of the presence of apparently supportive evidence, which was not obtained.
Finally, a caveat needs attention. In experiment 1, all photos had a label that identified the
commodity shown (as illustrated in Figure 1.1), repeating the name of one of the two
commodities mentioned in the claim. Such a label was missing in the no-photo condition, where
the names of both commodities were only presented as part of the claim itself. It is conceivable
that the verbal label of the photo shown increased processing fluency beyond the influence of the
photo itself. Experiment 2 addresses this concern by replicating experiment 1, using the same
procedures and materials, with the verbal labels removed from the photos. This also allows us to
test the robustness of the reported results in a direct replication that merely differs in the presence
of verbal labels on the nonprobative photos shown.
INTUITIONS OF TRUTH AND BEAUTY 59
3 Experiment 2
3.1 Method
Participants. We aimed to recruit 600 Mturk workers to keep the number of participants
consistent with experiment 1. The eligibility criteria and compensation followed experiment 1
and a total of 597 participants completed the study. No participant was excluded from data
analysis.
Material, Design, and Procedure. Experiment 2 is a direct replication of experiment 1,
except that the labels that identified the commodity shown were removed from the photographs.
A separate follow-up study indicated that participants could identify which commodity was
being shown to them in the low imageability condition even without the labels, M
Accuracy
= 0.607,
SD = 0.154, t (80) = 6.261, p < 0.001. For a detailed discussion, see Appendix D in
supplementary materials.
3.2 Results and Discussion
Data analysis followed the same procedure as experiment 1. As shown in the right-hand
panel of Figure 1.2 (see also Table 1), experiment 2 replicated the results of experiment 1,
although with slightly smaller effect sizes. A sensitivity power analysis using G*Power indicates
the experiment has 80% power to detect a minimum effect size of Cohen’s d = 0.163 or = .0066.
Claims accompanied by a photo of the subject were again more likely to be judged true than
claims accompanied by a photo of the referent; F(1, 595) = 18.186, p < .001, = .030, for the
main effect contrast. Compared to the no-photo condition (M = .517, SD = .256), photos of the
INTUITIONS OF TRUTH AND BEAUTY 60
subject produced truthiness effect (M = .558, SD = .258), F(1, 595) = 7.825, p = .005, = .013,
whereas photos of the referent produced a falsiness effect (M = .495, SD = .256), although the
latter was not significant, F(1, 595) = 1.981, p = .16, = .003.
Further replicating experiment 1, simple contrasts between the subject- and no-photo
conditions within each level of imageability revealed that photos of the subject increased
acceptance of the claim in the low imageability condition, t(290) = 3.544, p = .004, mean
difference = .070, 95% CI [.018, .121], Cohen’s d = .281, but not in the high imageability
condition, t(305) = .648, p > .999, mean difference = .015, 95% CI [-.036, .065], Cohen’s d =
.056. This is reflected in an interaction between imageability and the subject- vs. no-photo
contrast, F(1,595) = 3.317, p = .069, = .006. Also replicating experiment 1, simple contrasts
between the referent- vs. no-photo conditions showed that photos of the referent decreased
acceptance of the claim in the high imageability condition, t(305) = 2.458, p = .038, mean
difference = .053, 95% CI [.002, .104], Cohen’s d = .214, but not in the low imageability
condition, t(290) = .483, p > .999, mean difference = .01, 95% CI [-.042, .063], Cohen’s d =
.039. This is reflected in an interaction between imageability and the referent- vs. no-photo,
F(1,595) = 4.350, p = .037, = .007. Detailed descriptive statistics are reported in Table 1 and a
full omnibus ANOV A is reported in the supplementary materials.
INTUITIONS OF TRUTH AND BEAUTY 61
In sum, experiment 2 replicated the results of experiment 1 using the same procedures
and photos, while removing the previously used verbal identifiers of the commodities shown.
However, not all the differences observed in these experiments were significant and we address
this using analyses suggested by Mcshane and Böckenholt (2017).
4 Meta-Analysis
To calculate more precise effect size estimates for the influence of subject and referent
photos, we conducted a single-paper meta-analysis based on the comparative judgments
collected in experiments 1 and 2, following recommendations by Mcshane and Böckenholt
(2017). Appendix E presents the estimated unstandardized effect sizes (i.e., the raw mean
differences between the proportion of “true” responses to claims paired with each photo type).
INTUITIONS OF TRUTH AND BEAUTY 62
As shown in Figure 1.3a, all three main effect contrasts were significant. 1) Photos of the subject
produced a higher proportion of “true” responses than photos of the referent. When compared to
the no-photo condition, 2) photos of the subject increased acceptance of the claim, whereas 3)
photos of the referent decreased acceptance of the claim. This confirms the emergence of a
truthiness effect for subject photos and a falsiness effect for referent photos.
Simple contrasts within each imageability condition further revealed 4) that the truthiness
effect produced by subject photos was reliable when the commodities were difficult to imagine,
but not 5) when they were easy to imagine (Figure 1.3b). In contrast, the falsiness effect
produced by referent photos was 6) reliable when the commodities were easy to imagine, but 7)
not when they were difficult to imagine (Figure 1.3c). These effects are also reflected in
significant interactions between imageability and the main effect contrasts (i.e., subject vs. no
photo, referent vs. no photo), as shown in the right-hand panels of Figures 3b and 3c.
INTUITIONS OF TRUTH AND BEAUTY 63
Figure 1.3. Estimates of unstandardized effect sizes for experiments 1 and 2 and the single-paper
meta-analysis (Mcshane & Böckenholt, 2017). The size of the squares represents the average
sample size per condition; the horizontal thick and thin lines around the squares represent 50%
and 95% CI intervals, respectively. The top panel (a) shows the three main effect contrasts. The
middle panel (b) and bottom panel (c) show the effects of subject and referent photos,
respectively, within each imageability condition, followed by their interaction with imageability.
INTUITIONS OF TRUTH AND BEAUTY 64
5 General Discussion
We examined two potential mechanisms underlying the influence of nonprobative photos
on judgments of truth. Going beyond earlier research, we used comparative rather than
non-comparative claims, varied whether a nonprobative photo depicted the subject or the referent
of the comparison, and whether the subject of the claim was easy or difficult to process without a
photo. These variations allowed us to further illuminate and disentangle the processes underlying
the truthiness effect (Newman et al., 2012), and to identify novel conditions under which reliable
falsiness effects emerge.
That nonprobative photos can influence the perceived veracity of a claim has received
broad attention because it is counterintuitive and violates normative standards of truth
assessment -- after all, nonprobative photos provide no evidence bearing on the claim. An
analysis in terms of Grice’s (1975) logic of conversation calls this assumption into question. The
mere fact that normatively irrelevant information is presented as part of a task renders it
conversationally relevant, which can entice participants to draw on it in forming a judgment (for
reviews, see Schwarz, 1994, 1996). Presenting a photo as part of a claim may similarly convey
that it can be treated as evidence for the claim. Moreover, most photos that people encounter in
daily life capture real events and photos have long been offered as evidence that an event has
truly occurred (Mnookin, 1998). In addition, photos are rich in perceptual and semantic details
and people are more likely to assume that a mental event (e.g., an episodic memory) reflects
reality when it features such details (Johnson et al., 1988). In combination, these factors may
create an illusion of supportive evidence when a claim is presented with a related photo, even
INTUITIONS OF TRUTH AND BEAUTY 65
when the photo does not have clear probative value. This account has not been directly tested in
previous studies and seems more popular in skeptical reviews than in empirical research.
Plausible as the account is, we have not obtained support for it. First, the illusion-of-evidence
account predicts a main effect of presenting a related photo that is independent of the
imageability of the subject. However, the imageability of the subject moderated the size of
truthiness effects in both experiments with comparative claims, as well as the preliminary
experiment with noncomparative claims reported in the supplementary materials. The
illusion-of-evidence account also fails to explain a falsiness effect when nonprobative photos of
the referent are presented and its moderation by imageability, in contrast to the results of
experiments 1 and 2.
However, one might attempt to reconcile the illusion-of-evidence account with the
obtained falsiness effect by assuming that a photo increases the perceived importance of the
commodity it shows. Hence, whatever is shown in the photo is more likely to have increased in
price, which produces a truthiness effect for subject photos and a falsiness effect for referent
photos under the constraints of the claims used in the present experiments. Again, this ex post
facto variant of the illusion-of-evidence account does not predict the observed moderation by
imageability, and hence also fails to provide a coherent explanation of the results.
In contrast, the present results are fully consistent with a fluency account of truth
judgment. As observed in numerous studies, claims are more likely to be accepted as true when
incidental influences make them easier to process. This presumably reflects that fluency can be
brought to bear on key criteria that people use in judging truth (Schwarz, 2015): Is it compatible
with other things I know? Is it internally coherent and free of contradictions? Does it come from
INTUITIONS OF TRUTH AND BEAUTY 66
a credible source? Do others believe it? Each of these criteria can be evaluated analytically by
drawing on relevant declarative inputs or intuitively by drawing on the ease with which the claim
can be processed. When statements are coherent (Johnson-Laird, 2012) and compatible with the
recipient’s knowledge (Winkielman et al., 2012) they are more fluently processed than when they
are incoherent or at odds with other beliefs the recipient holds. Fluently processed names feel
more familiar and endow their bearers with higher trustworthiness (Silva et al., 2017). Widely
shared beliefs have been encountered more frequently and are more easily processed due to
repetition, which increases estimates of social consensus even when all repetitions come from a
single source (Weaver et al., 2007). Finally, the amount of supporting evidence is overestimated
when some can easily be brought to mind (Schwarz, Sanna, Skurnik, & Yoon, 2007), consistent
with the availability heuristic (Kahneman & Tversky, 1973). In short, the metacognitive
experience of fluency provides an affirmative, but fallible, answer to each of the major truth
criteria people use in assessing the veracity of claims (Schwarz, 2015, 2018). But as in other
domains of judgment, people are more sensitive to their feelings than to the source of those
feelings and hence misread incidental subjective experiences as relevant to the judgment at hand
(for reviews, see Schwarz, 2010; Schwarz & Clore, 2007). Hence, many incidental
manipulations of fluency have been found to increase a claim’s acceptance, from repeating a
claim (e.g., Hasher et al., 1977) to repeating its denial (e.g., Skurnik et al., 2005), presenting it in
an easy-to-read color contrast (e.g., Reber & Schwarz, 1999), in high acoustic quality (e.g.,
Newman & Schwarz, 2018) or a rhyming form (McGlone & Tofighbakhsh, 2000).
From this perspective, nonprobative photos should increase the acceptance of a claim to
the extent that they facilitate processing of the claim, but decrease acceptance to the extent that
INTUITIONS OF TRUTH AND BEAUTY 67
they impair processing of the claim. Empirically, this was the case. First, relative to a no-photo
condition, nonprobative photos of the subject of a claim increased acceptance of comparative
claims, provided that the subject of the claim was unfamiliar and difficult to imagine without a
photo. This moderation by familiarity and imageability parallels the earlier observation that
nonprobative photos exert less influence on the acceptance of non-comparative claims when the
subject of the claim is familiar (Newman et al., 2012; Abed et al., 2017).
Second, and more importantly, nonprobative photos of the referent decreased the
acceptance of comparative claims as true, provided that the subject was easy to imagine without
a photo. Empirically, this provides first evidence that related photos can produce falsiness
effects. In research with non-comparative claims, falsiness effects were only observed for
unrelated photos (Newman et al., 2015, experiments 5 and 6), that is, photos that had no
substantive relationship to the claim (e.g., a photo of a pig shown with a claim about shoelaces).
Note that falsiness effects of unrelated photos are compatible with a fluency as well as an
illusion-of-evidence account. From an illusion-of-evidence perspective, a clearly unrelated photo
surely cannot be evidence for the claim and calls the communicator’s cooperativeness into
question, triggering a more skeptical analysis of the claim. In contrast, photos of the referent of a
comparative claim are related to the substance of the claim and hence could serve as evidence.
From a fluency perspective, an unrelated photo impairs processing of the claim by introducing a
distractor. Similarly, a photo of the referent impairs processing of comparative claims because
comparative processing starts with the subject of the claim, not the referent. In both cases, the
emergence of falsiness effects can be plausibly traced to low processing fluency.
INTUITIONS OF TRUTH AND BEAUTY 68
Third, truthiness as well as falsiness effects were moderated by imageability and
familiarity, consistent with the relative nature of the informational value of fluency experiences
(Newman et al., 2015; Wänke & Hansen, 2015). Presenting a comparative claim with a
nonprobative photo of the subject increased acceptance of the claim relative to a no-photo
condition when the subject was difficult to imagine; however, it did not influence acceptance
relative to a no-photo condition when the subject was already easy to imagine (Figure 1.3b).
Conversely, presenting a comparative claim with a photo of the referent decreased acceptance of
the claim relative to a no-photo condition when the subject would otherwise have been easy to
imagine; however, it did not influence judgment relative to a no-photo condition when the
subject was expected to be difficult to imagine to begin with (Figure 3c). Throughout, photos
influenced judgments of truth when the resulting fluency experience deviated from what it would
have been without a photo but not otherwise.
5.1 Limitations and Future Directions
Some limitations are worth noting. First, we used statements about commodities because
they allowed us to have an objective standard to manipulate imageability/familiarity based on the
ratings in the MRC Psycholinguistic Database (Wilson, 1988). Future research may test the
robustness of the observed effects in other domains, including comparative claims about persons.
Second, imageability/familiarity was manipulated as a between-subject variable to avoid large
discrepancies in the imageability of the items that participants were asked to compare.
Theoretically, within-subject variations in imageability would further add to item-to-item
changes in fluency, which may attenuate or enhance the observed effects depending on the
resulting change in processing fluency. Finally, as is common in this type of research,
INTUITIONS OF TRUTH AND BEAUTY 69
participants made numerous truth judgments within a short time, often bearing on unfamiliar
targets. Both of these aspects may have reduced task engagement compared to naturalistic
conditions under which a recipient may only be exposed to one or two claims at a time. Future
research may fruitfully address the role of task engagement by varying the number of claims and
their personal relevance.
Despite these caveats, our findings add to the converging evidence that processing
fluency is likely the main mechanism underlying the influence of nonprobative photos on the
acceptance and rejection of claims. They also suggest that much can be learned by moving from
omnibus manipulations of fluency (such as repetition, print font, color contrast, auditory quality)
to manipulations that differentially affect specific components of a statement. By showing that a
photo of the subject can facilitate, and a photo of the referent impair, acceptance of a
comparative claim, our findings challenge the assumption that easy processing of the parts
always fosters easy processing and acceptance of the whole. Future research may fruitfully
explore how the differential fluency of components of complex materials affects metacognitive
experience and judgment in other domains.
INTUITIONS OF TRUTH AND BEAUTY 70
Chapter 3: Conceptual Metaphors, Processing Fluency, and Aesthetic Preferences
3
Chapter Preface
In everyday language, abstract concepts are described in terms of concrete physical
experiences (e.g., good things are “up”; the past is “behind” us). Stimuli congruent with such
conceptual metaphors are processed faster than stimuli that are not. Since ease of processing
enhances aesthetic pleasure, stimuli should be perceived as more pleasing when their
presentation matches (rather than mismatches) the metaphorical mapping. In six experiments,
speakers of English (Experiment 1-3a) and Farsi (Experiment 3b and 4) viewed valence- and
time-related photos in arrangements congruent and incongruent with their metaphorical mapping.
Consistent with the valence-verticality metaphor in both languages, English and Farsi speakers
preferred visual arrangements that placed the happy photo above the sad photo. In contrast,
participants’ preferences for time-related photos were moderated by the direction of writing.
English speakers, who write from left to right, preferred arrangements that placed past-themed
photos to the left of modern-themed photos; this was not observed for Farsi speakers, who write
from right to left as well as left to right. In sum, identical stimuli enjoy an aesthetic advantage
when their spatial arrangement matches the spatial ordering implied by applicable conceptual
metaphors.
3
Chapter 3 is adapted from Zhang, L., Atari, M., Schwarz, N., Newman, E. J., Afhami, R.
(2022). Conceptual metaphor, fluency, and aesthetic pleasure. Journal of Experimental Social
Psychology, 98, 104247. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jesp.2021.104247
INTUITIONS OF TRUTH AND BEAUTY 71
1 Chapter Introduction
Is beauty in the eye of the beholder or in features of the beholden? Experimental research
indicates that attributes of the beholden (e.g., symmetry, contrast, and clarity) as well as
attributes of the beholder (e.g., prior exposure and implicit learning) influence perceptions of
beauty through facilitating or impairing ease of processing (for reviews, see Reber et al., 2004;
Schwarz, 2018). From this perspective, beauty is a function of the perceiver’s processing
experience, which depends on the interplay of object, perceiver, and context characteristics.
Supporting this view, research has shown that object attributes that enhance aesthetic pleasure --
such as high figure-ground contrast (e.g., Checkosky & Whitlock, 1973), clarity (Whittlesea et
al., 1990), symmetry (Cárdenas & Harris, 2006; Enquist & Arak, 1994; Garner, 1974), and
prototypicality (Winkielman et al., 2006)-- also facilitate efficient processing and fast recognition
(for a review, see Reber et al., 2004). So do perceiver variables, such as prior exposure to the
object (Haber & Hershenson, 1965; Jacoby & Dallas,1981), to some of its attributes (Reber et al.,
1998), or to related semantic concepts (Winkielman et al., 2003). Similarly, context variables,
from ambient lighting to noise and the presence of materials that can serve as semantic primes,
can influence processing fluency and pleasure (for a review, see Reber et al., 2004). Independent
of which variable facilitates ease of processing, easy processing elicits a sense of familiarity
(Whittlesea, 1993; Kinder et al., 2003) and positive affect (Winkielman et al., 2003; Winkielman
et al., 2006). When asked to evaluate how much they like an object, how beautiful they find it, or
which of several objects they prefer, people draw on their concurrent subjective experiences and
provide more favorable evaluations of fluently processed objects (for reviews, see Reber et al.,
INTUITIONS OF TRUTH AND BEAUTY 72
2004; Schwarz, 2018; Schwarz et al., 2021). The underlying process is consistent with
feelings-as-information theory (Schwarz, 1990, 2012; Schwarz & Clore, 1983), which
conceptualizes the use of subjective experiences (including moods, emotions, metacognitive, and
bodily experiences) as a source of information in human judgment.
Building on this work, we examine the influence of conceptual metaphors (Lakoff &
Johnson, 1980). In everyday language, abstract concepts are often described in terms of concrete
physical experiences. For example, good things are “up”; the past comes “before” the present;
important things are “heavy”; and nice people are “warm”. Numerous studies demonstrated that
such metaphors are not just figures of speech, but cognitive tools people use to conceptualize
abstract concepts (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980, 1999; for a review see Landau, 2017). Hence,
processing of information should be easier when the information is consistent with the
implications of conceptual metaphors than when it is not. Empirically, this is the case, as
reviewed in the next section. Accordingly, we predict that metaphor-congruent materials are also
more aesthetically pleasing. We test this hypothesis with two different metaphors. One pertains
to the relationship between valence and vertical location in space and places the good “above”
the bad; the other pertains to the relationship between time and horizontal location in space and
places the past “before” the present and future. Below, we elaborate on these metaphors and
cultural and linguistic variations in their expression before we report experimental tests
conducted with native speakers of English (in the United States) and Farsi (in Iran).
1.1 Valence and Verticality
Numerous expressions entail that good things are “up” and bad things are “down” --
feeling “on top of the world” is preferred over feeling “down”, a “thumbs up” signal is more
INTUITIONS OF TRUTH AND BEAUTY 73
favorable than a “thumbs down” signal, and good people go “up” to heaven, whereas bad people
go “down” to hell. This metaphorical link between valence and verticality can be observed in
many languages, (Kövecses, 2000; Lakoff & Johnson, 1980; Li, 2010; Niksiyar, 2018;
Sutton-Spence, 2010), including English and Farsi, and may be universal. Research examining
the impact of vertical placement on evaluative judgment has shown that things that are
positioned “up” are perceived more positively than things that are positioned “down”. For
example, fictional cities that are positioned in the top vs. bottom section of a map are perceived
as being more desirable to live in (Meier et al., 2011) and survey items are evaluated more
positively when presented near the top of the screen than when presented further down
(Tourangeau et al., 2013).
Since people use verticality as a way to process valence-related concepts, material that is
congruent with the metaphor should be easier to process than material that is incongruent with it.
Empirically, this is the case. Meier and Robinson (2004, Experiment 1; see also Meier, Sellbom,
& Wygant, 2007) found that positive words were evaluated faster when presented at the top of
the computer screen, above a fixation point, whereas negative words were evaluated faster when
presented at the bottom of the screen, below the fixation point. Moreover, exposure to a positive
word in the middle of the screen facilitated the subsequent identification of a neutral visual
stimulus shown in the upper region of the screen, whereas exposure to a negative word did so for
stimuli shown in the lower region of the screen (Meier & Robinson, 2004, Experiment 2).
Facilitative effects of metaphor congruence can also be observed across modalities, with
exposure to positive words facilitating the identification of high-pitched tones and exposure to
negative words facilitating the classification of low-pitched tones (Weger et al., 2007).
INTUITIONS OF TRUTH AND BEAUTY 74
Such findings indicate that stimuli that are congruent with the metaphorical
valence-verticality link are processed more easily than stimuli that are not. Given that ease of
processing is a key determinant of aesthetic pleasure (Reber et al., 2004; Schwarz, 2018), we
predict that visual arrangements of valenced photographs that are congruent with the
up-is-good/down-is-bad metaphor will be preferred over arrangements that are not. We further
predict that this preference will be observed for speakers of English as well as Farsi, given that
their cultures share the same valence-verticality metaphor.
1.2 Time and Space
The progression of time is often described in terms of locomotion through space
(Boroditsky, 2000; Tenbrink, 2011; for a review, see Boroditsky, 2011). Metaphorically, the past
is “behind” us and the future is “ahead” of us; we move “forward” towards the future, leaving
our past “behind”. The grounding of time in space has been observed in many of the world’s
languages (Haspelmath, 1997; Radden, 2004). Supporting the assumption that metaphor
congruence facilitates fluent processing, Torralbo and colleagues (2006, Experiment 1) found
that the spatial placement of a word influences how fast its temporal meaning can be identified.
In an ingenious arrangement, they showed past- or future-oriented words next to a side-looking
head silhouette and asked participants whether the word refers to the past or the future. The
temporal reference of future-oriented words was identified faster when the words were presented
in front of the silhouette (as if the person were looking at them), whereas the temporal
orientation of past-oriented words was identified faster when the words were presented in the
back of the silhouette.
INTUITIONS OF TRUTH AND BEAUTY 75
Although a general grounding of time in space may be universal (Boroditsky, 2011), its
specific implementation shows cultural variation when the relationship is mapped onto a
two-dimensional space. Not surprisingly, whether the letter X comes “before” or “after” the letter
Y in the sequence “X-Y” depends on whether the perceiver reads from left to right (as you will
just have done, reading an English language article) or from right to left. Empirically, the
forward-backward spatial representation of time follows the direction of writing and reading
(Boroditsky, 2011; Tversky et al,, 1991). Hence, speakers of languages that are written from left
to right (e.g., English) project the past to the left and the future to the right (Ouellet, Santiago,
Funes, & Lupáñez, 2010a; Santiago et al., 2007), whereas the reverse has been observed for
speakers of languages that are written from right to left, such as Hebrew (Fuhrman & Boroditsky,
2010) and Arabic (Maass & Russo, 2003). Further supporting the hypothesis that metaphor
congruence facilitates processing, Ouellet et al. (2010, Experiment 1) found that the mere
activation of temporal concepts is sufficient to shift the focus of spatial attention. Holding
past-related concepts in mind directed the attention of native Spanish speakers to the left,
whereas holding future-related concepts in mind directed their attention to the right, resulting in
enhanced performance on a spatial orientation task when the target location was congruent with
the spatial implication of the activated time concept. Related work suggests that these facilitation
effects are not limited to visual stimulus presentations but also observed under auditory
conditions (Ouellett, Santiago, Israeli, & Gabay, 2010). Native speakers of Spanish (who read
and write from left to right) were faster responding to orally presented past-words with their left
hand and to orally presented future-words with their right hand; this pattern reversed for native
speakers of Hebrew (who read and write from right to left).
INTUITIONS OF TRUTH AND BEAUTY 76
Given that ease of processing influences aesthetic preference (Reber et al., 2004; Schwarz,
2018), we hypothesize that visual arrangements of time-related photographs that are consistent
with the writing direction of the perceiver’s language will be preferred to arrangements that are
not. This predicts that speakers of languages that are written from left to right (e.g., English,
Dutch, Spanish) prefer arrangements that place past-themed photos to the left. This preference
should not be observed for speakers of languages that are written from right to left (e.g., Hebrew,
Arabic, Farsi), who should instead prefer arrangements that place past-themed photos to the
right. We further conjecture that the observed effects may be more pronounced for speakers of
left-to-right languages than for speakers of right-to-left languages. Most notably, left-to-right
languages do not include elements that are written right-to-left, whereas right-to-left languages
write all numerical expressions from left-to-right, thus reversing the direction of writing between
verbal and numerical expressions. Moreover, the cultural dominance of Western media and
smartphones makes it more likely that speakers of Farsi are exposed to some material that flows
left-to-right than that English speakers are exposed to material that flows right-to-left.
1.3 The Present Research
To test the prediction that metaphor congruence enhances aesthetic experience, we draw
on the two metaphors discussed above, which relate valence to vertical position in space and
time to horizontal position in space. Metaphor congruence and incongruence is implemented
through the spatial arrangement of photographs, as illustrated in Figure 2.1. Displays that place a
positively valenced photo above a negatively valenced photo are congruent with the
valence-verticality metaphor, whereas the reverse arrangement is incongruent with this metaphor.
Displays that place a past-themed photo “before” a modern-themed photo are congruent with the
INTUITIONS OF TRUTH AND BEAUTY 77
time-space metaphor, whereas the reverse arrangement is incongruent with this metaphor. As
discussed, what counts as “before” or “after” in a horizontal display depends on the perceiver’s
direction of reading, giving rise to cultural variation.
Because a choice between two simultaneously presented stimuli imposes no memory load
and forced-choice tasks show minimal response bias effects (Palmer et al., 2013), we assess
aesthetic preference by using a two-alternative forced-choice paradigm, asking participants to
select their preferred arrangement. Previous research found that judgments of preference, liking,
and beauty show similar patterns (Bornstein, 1989; Reber et al., 2004) and we vary the wording
of the choice task across experiments. Throughout, our interest is in the perceiver’s aesthetic
preference, not in the perceiver’s evaluation of the object’s artistic value. Many aesthetically
pleasing objects lack high artistic value (e.g., a photo of a sunset); conversely, many objects of
high artistic value are not aesthetically pleasing (e.g., Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain, a urinal
altered to resemble a drinking fountain).
In all experiments, we present valenced photographs in arrangements that are congruent
or incongruent with the good-is-up/bad-is-down metaphor and past- vs. present-themed
photographs in arrangements that are congruent or incongruent with the past-before-present
metaphor. Consistent with the theoretical rationale of fluency research and robust findings across
classic fluency tasks, all manipulations are within-participants. People are more sensitive to
changes in their processing experience than to stable states, which makes within-participant
manipulations more powerful than between-participant manipulations, where some participants
are only exposed to easy-to-process and others only to difficult-to-process material (Wänke &
Hansen, 2015). Hence, classic fluency effects, including Zajonc’s (1968) mere exposure effect
INTUITIONS OF TRUTH AND BEAUTY 78
and Hasher and colleagues’ (1977) illusory truth effect, are reliably observed in within- but not
in between-participant designs (Dechêne et al., 2009; Hansen et al., 2008). This makes
within-participant manipulations more appropriate for testing fluency predictions than
between-participant manipulations.
Experiment 1 examines aesthetic preference by asking native speakers of English to
select the arrangement they think is better. Experiments 2a-b replicate Experiment 1 by asking
native speakers of English to select the arrangement they like more. Experiments 3a-b investigate
cultural differences of preference between English and Farsi speakers. Experiment 4 examined
the effect of familiarity with English on Farsi speakers’ preference. Finally, a single paper
meta-analysis (Bornstein, Hedges, Higgins, & Rothstein, 2013) examined the consistency of
results across experiments and is presented in Appendix A of the supplementary materials. All
materials and data are available at
https://osf.io/xystg/?view_only=bf82a309fa3e4c7abdc5a06a626e5a33.
2 Experiment 1
2.1 Method
Participants. Based on the effect size of Reber and colleagues’ (1998) experiment 1
(Cohen’s d=0.24), a sample of 139 participants is required to achieve a power of 0.80 at alpha =
0.05. To ensure sufficient power after excluding non-native speakers of English, we recruited
190 undergraduate students from the University of Southern California, who completed the
experiment online. The exclusion of 28 non-native speakers of English left a total of 162
participants for analysis.
INTUITIONS OF TRUTH AND BEAUTY 79
Design and Materials. Eight pairs of time-related photos (past vs. modern) and eight
pairs of valence-related photos (happy vs. sad) were presented to each participant, along with
eight pairs of filler photos (e.g., animals and landscape). For the time-related and valence-related
photos, half of the pairs were arranged horizontally and half vertically (Figure 1). This results in
four within-subject combinations of photos x spatial arrangement. Two of these combinations
(time-horizontal, valence-vertical) bear on the theoretical predictions and two (time-vertical, and
valence-horizontal) are exploratory. Next, we describe these combinations.
Metaphor Conditions. The combinations of interest pertain to the horizontal placement
of time-related photos and the vertical placement of valence-related photos. For speakers of
English and other languages that write from left to right, the past-before-future metaphor implies
that the past is on the left and the future on the right when presented in two-dimensional space.
Hence, a horizontal visual arrangement that presents past-themed photos to the left of
modern-themed photos is metaphor congruent, whereas the reverse arrangement is metaphor
incongruent. For the good-is-up/bad-is-down metaphor, a vertical visual arrangement that
presents positively valenced photos above negatively valenced photos is metaphor congruent,
whereas the reverse arrangement is metaphor incongruent.
Exploratory Conditions. The remaining combinations are silent on the role of metaphor
congruence in aesthetic preference because the metaphors do not bear on the vertical location of
time or the horizontal location of valence. We included these combinations for exploratory
purposes (Appendix B of the supplementary materials).
Procedure. All participants saw all 16 pairs of photos along with 8 pairs of filler photos.
Half of the participants saw all horizontal arrangements first and half saw all vertical
INTUITIONS OF TRUTH AND BEAUTY 80
arrangements first. The order of presentation was randomized within the horizontal and vertical
conditions. For each pair of photos, participants were asked to choose the arrangement that they
think is better. At the end of the experiment, demographic information was collected.
Figure 2.1. An example of horizontal arrangements of time-related photos (left) and vertical
arrangements of valence-related photos (right).
2.2 Results and Discussion
Trials where the participant chose the congruent arrangement were coded “1” and trials
where the participant chose the incongruent arrangement were coded “0”. For each metaphor
condition, the proportion of times participants chose the metaphor congruent over the metaphor
incongruent arrangement was obtained by averaging responses from each trial, which was then
compared against chance (0.5) with a two-tailed one-sample t-test. A sensitivity power analysis
using G*Power indicates 80% power to detect a minimum effect size of Cohen’s d = 0.196.
INTUITIONS OF TRUTH AND BEAUTY 81
As predicted, participants preferred the metaphor-congruent arrangement over the
metaphor-incongruent arrangement for both time and valence metaphors (see Figure 2.2 and
Table 1). The proportion of trials participants chose happy-above-sad arrangements over
sad-above-happy arrangements was 0.613, 95% CI [0.563, 0.662], t(161) = 4.445, p < 0.001. The
preference for the happy-above-sad arrangements was observed in seven out of eight pairs of
valence-themed photos, with five of them being significant. The proportion of times participants
chose past-on-the-left arrangements was 0.664, 95% CI [0.617, 0.710], t(161) = 6.928, p < 0.001.
The preference for past-on-the-left arrangements was observed for all of the eight time-themed
photo pairs, with six of them being significant. These results provide first evidence that
metaphor-congruent arrangements are perceived as “better” than metaphor-incongruent
arrangements. Experiments 2a-b replicate this effect by asking participants to select the
arrangement they “like more”.
3 Experiment 2a-b: Liking
3.1 Method
Participants. Based on the smallest effect size observed in Study 1 (valence-verticality,
Cohen’s d = 0.349), G-power software (Faul et al., 2007) indicates that a total sample size of 67
is needed for a two-tailed one-sample t-test at an alpha level of .05 and power of .80. We
recruited 80 participants to allow for the exclusion of non-native speakers of English (see
https://aspredicted.org/pp59i.pdf for the pre-registration).
Experiment 2a was conducted on Amazon Mechanical Turk and Experiment 2b in the subject
pool of the University of Southern California; eighty time-slots were posted for each experiment.
INTUITIONS OF TRUTH AND BEAUTY 82
For Experiment 2a, participation was limited to those with United States IP addresses and
approval ratings of 95% or higher for previous HITS. Participants were compensated with $0.50;
N = 80 participants completed the study. For Experiment 2b, undergraduates who are native
speakers of English were recruited. All participants in Experiment 2a and 2b reported being
native speakers of English and none were excluded from data analysis.
Design and Material. The design of Experiment 2a and 2b was identical to Experiment
1, except that half of the photographs used in Experiment 1 were replaced with new stimuli, in
order to 1) make the photos in each pair resemble each other more in terms in terms of lighting
and orientation, and 2) to use more culturally appropriate photos for an Iranian sample that we
planned to recruit in Experiment 3.
Procedure. Experiments 2a and 2b followed the same procedures as Experiment 1,
except that the wording of the selection task now read, “Which arrangement do you like more?”.
INTUITIONS OF TRUTH AND BEAUTY 83
Figure 2.2. Results of Experiment 1, 2a, and 2b. The error bars represent 95% confidence
intervals.
3.2 Results and Discussion
The proportion of times participants chose the metaphor congruent arrangement over the
incongruent one was again compared to chance (0.5) with a two-tailed one-sample t-test. A
sensitivity power analysis using G*Power indicates each experiment has 80% power to detect a
minimum effect size of Cohen’s d = 0.280.
Valence: Happy is “Up”. As shown in Figure 2.2 and Table 2, participants selected the
metaphor-congruent happy-above-sad arrangements more frequently than the
metaphor-incongruent sad-above-happy arrangements. However, the observed differences were
small and not significant; M = 0.550, 95% CI [0.464, 0.636], t(79) = 1.139, p = 0.258 for
Experiment 2a, and M = 0.553, 95% CI [0.479, 0.627], t(79) = 1.411, p = 0.162 for Experiment
2b. The preference for happy-above-sad arrangements was observed in six of the eight pairs in
Experiment 2a, and seven out of the eight pairs in Experiment 2b. However, none reached
significance. A single-paper meta-analysis (Bornstein et al., 2013) including these nonsignificant
effects confirmed the overall reliability of the consistent patterns across studies (see Appendix A
of supplementary materials).
Time: Past “Before” Future. Replicating Experiment 1, participants preferred the
metaphor congruent past-on-the-left arrangements over the metaphor incongruent past-on-the
right arrangements in both studies; M = 0.700, 95% CI [0.629, 0.771], t(79)=5.519, p < 0.001,
for Experiment 2a, and M = 0.631, 95% CI [0.563, 0.700], t(79)=3.749, p < 0.001, for
INTUITIONS OF TRUTH AND BEAUTY 84
Experiment 2b. This preference for past-on-the-left arrangements was observed in all of the eight
time-themed photo pairs in Experiment 2a, and seven out of the eight pairs in Experiment 2b,
with five pairs being significant in each experiment.
In sum, Experiments 1, 2a, and 2b show the predicted preference for metaphor congruent
over metaphor incongruent displays of visual stimuli. Among native speakers of English, the
observed differences are larger and more reliable for time-related stimuli than for valence-related
stimuli. Next, we turn to the moderation of metaphor congruence effects by culturo-linguistic
differences in the direction of writing.
4 Experiment 3a-b: Cultural Differences
At the conceptual level, good things are “up” and the past comes “before” the present
across many cultures and languages. However, whether X “precedes” or “follows” Y in an X-Y
arrangement may depend on the direction of reading -- X precedes Y when reading from left to
right, but follows Y when reading from right to left. Hence, the direction in which perceivers
read should moderate aesthetic preference for time-related materials but not for valence-related
materials. Experiment 3a and b test this prediction with native speakers of English in the U.S.,
who read from left to right, and native speakers of Farsi in Iran, who write from right to left.
Because good things are metaphorically “up” in both English and Farsi, happy-above-sad
arrangements should be preferred over sad-above-happy arrangements for both U.S. and Iranian
participants. In Farsi, there are numerous metaphoric expressions indicating that good, important,
sacred, and valuable things or beings are “up”, while deplorable, trivial, evil, and worthless
things are “down”. Much of this metaphoric language is reflected in ancient and contemporary
INTUITIONS OF TRUTH AND BEAUTY 85
Persian poetry (Niksiyar, 2018). However, English and Farsi speakers should differ in their
preference for the horizontal arrangement of time-themed materials. Past-on-the-left
arrangements should be preferred over past-on-the-right arrangements by U.S. participants,
whereas Farsi speakers in Iran should show the reverse pattern because Farsi text reads from
right to left, although numbers read from left to right in Farsi. Consistent with this difference in
the direction of text and numbers, Iranians prefer the right-to-left arrangements when objects are
labeled in Farsi, but prefer left-to-right arrangements when objects are labeled numerically
(Matoori et al., 2020).
4.1 Method
Participants. We preregistered to recruit 80 participants in each country. Due to a
discrepancy between the recruitment platforms and Qualtrics, 84 U.S. students at the University
of Southern California (Experiment 3a) and 90 Iranian participants (Experiment 3b) from Tarbiat
Modares University (Tehran, Iran) completed the experiments online. We pre-registered to
exclude participants who do not speak English as their native language for Experiment 3a
(https://aspredicted.org/pv2py.pdf) and participants who indicate a native language that writes
from left to right for Experiment 3b (https://aspredicted.org/74qp3.pdf). This resulted in the
exclusion of one U.S. participant in Experiment 3a (leaving N = 83 for analysis) and five Iranian
participants in Experiment 3b (leaving N = 85 for analysis).
Design, Material, and Procedure. The design and material of Experiment 3a and 3b
were identical to Experiment 2a and 2b. The procedure was identical to Experiment 1, where
participants were asked to select the arrangement that they think is “better”. For Iranian
participants (Experiment 3b), all instructions and questions were presented in Farsi.
INTUITIONS OF TRUTH AND BEAUTY 86
4.2 Results and Discussion
We again computed a two-tailed one-sample t-test for each metaphor to compare the
proportion of times participants choose the metaphor-congruent arrangement to chance (0.5).
Figure 2.3 depicts the results. A sensitivity power analysis using G*Power indicates Experiment
3a and 3b have 80% power to detect a minimum effect size of Cohen’s d = 0.275 and 0.272,
respectively.
Valence: Happy is “Up”. Consistent with the hypothesis, native speakers of English as
well as Farsi preferred the happy-above-sad arrangements; M = 0.584, 95% CI [0.517, 0.652],
t(82) = 2.455, p = 0.016 for the English speaking U.S. participants, and M = 0.629, 95% CI
[0.559, 0.700], t(84) = 3.605, p = 0.001 for the Farsi-speaking Iranian participants. This
preference for happy-above-sad arrangements was observed in all of the eight pairs for English
speakers and in seven out of eight pairs for Farsi speakers, although only one and three pairs
reached significance, respectively. A logistic regression (P(Preference
ij
=1) = logistic(γ
00
+ γ
01
Country
j
+ u
0j
)) with country (0 = US, 1 = Iran) as a predictor yielded similar results, Mean
Predicted Probability = 0.591, 95% CI [0.517, 0.664], p = 0.017 for the English speaking U.S.
participants, and Mean Predicted Probability = 0.641, 95% CI [0.569, 0.712], p < 0.001, for
Farsi speaking participants, with no significant difference in the mean predicted probabilities
between the two countries, OR = 1.288, 95% CI [0.771, 2.175], p = 0.331.
Time: Past “Before” Future. Consistent with our predictions, native speakers of
English again preferred the past-on-the-left arrangements, M = 0.690, 95% CI [0.622, 0.758],
t(82)=5.467, p < 0.001. This preference was observed in all eight pairs of time-themed photos,
with five of them being significant. Also consistent with predictions, this preference was not
INTUITIONS OF TRUTH AND BEAUTY 87
observed for speakers of Farsi; for Farsi speakers, the preference for past-on-the-left
arrangements was only observed in two out of eight time-themed photos, and none was
significant. However, contrary to predictions, the preference for past-on-the-left arrangements
was only eliminated and not fully reversed, M = 0.477, 95% CI [0.409, 0.544], t(84) = -0.679, p
= 0.499. A logistic regression (P(Preference
ij
=1) = logistic(γ
00
+ γ
01
Country
j
+ u
0j
)) with country
(0 = US, 1 = Iran) as a predictor yielded similar results, Mean Predicted Probability
Past-Left
=
0.706, 95% CI [0.637, 0.773], p < 0.001 for the English speaking U.S. participants, and Mean
Predicted Probability
Past-Left
= 0.475, 95% CI [0.400, 0.549], p = 0.504 for the Farsi speaking
participants. This is reflected in a significant difference between the two countries, with a 0.692
decrease in the odds of Iranian participants choosing the past-on-the-left arrangements compared
to U.S. participants, OR=0.308, 95% CI [0.176, 0.518], p < 0.001.
In sum, these findings replicate Experiments 1, 2a, and 2b for English speakers in the
U.S. and allow comparisons with Farsi speakers in Iran. As predicted, both groups preferred the
metaphor-congruent happy-above-sad arrangements over the metaphor-incongruent
sad-above-happy arrangements. This is consistent with the use of the same metaphor in both
cultures. Both cultures also share the past-before-future metaphor, but the representation of this
metaphor in two-dimensional space differs as a function of the direction of writing. As predicted.
English speakers preferred the metaphor congruent past-on-the-left arrangements over the
metaphor-incongruent past-on-the-right arrangements, whereas Farsi speakers did not. In contrast
to predictions, however, Farsi speakers did not show a reverse preference for past-on-the right
arrangements. Experiment 4 addresses possible reasons for this observation.
INTUITIONS OF TRUTH AND BEAUTY 88
Figure 2.3. Results of Experiment 3a and 3b. The error bars represent 95% confidence intervals.
5 Experiment 4: Iranian Replication
As noted, Farsi is written from right to left, whereas numbers are written from left to
right, which makes Farsi speakers familiar with both directions of writing and reading.
Moreover, modern technology has to some extent disrupted the traditional flow of writing: when
texting on mobile phones, many Farsi speakers write Farsi with English letters in a left-to-right
direction. Some Iranian scholars have referred to this manner of writing as “Finglish”, a
portmanteau coined from the combination of the words “Farsi” and “English” (e.g., Alipour et
al., 2013). Finglish is particularly popular among young people in Iran. Moreover, the Farsi
speakers of the university sample used in Experiment 3b were most likely familiar with English
INTUITIONS OF TRUTH AND BEAUTY 89
as a second language. To address these possibilities, we collected information on the frequency
of texting in “Finglish” and familiarity with English as a second language in Experiment 4,
which is a replication of Experiment 3b in all other respects.
5.1 Method
Participants. We pre-registered to recruit 260 participants and to exclude those who
indicate a native language that writes from left to right (see https://aspredicted.org/3cy83.pdf for
the pre-registration). Due to a discrepancy between the recruitment platforms and Qualtrics, 269
participants at Tarbiat Modares University completed the experiment. One participant who
reported English as their native language was excluded from data analysis.
Design, Material, and Procedure. Experiment 4 used the same material and design as
Experiment 2a-b and 3a-b. Participants completed the experiment in Farsi, and were asked to
select the arrangement that they think is better. Participants were asked to self-report their
English proficiency on a 1-7 scale, where 1 indicates low and 7 indicates high English
proficiency. Participants were also asked to report the frequency with which they use “Finglish”
(using English letters to type Farsi in the left-to-right direction).
5.2 Results and Discussion
A two-tailed one-sample t-test was computed for each metaphor. A sensitivity power
analysis using G*Power indicates the experiment has 80% power to detect a minimum effect size
of Cohen’s d = 0.152. In addition, English familiarity scores were obtained by averaging
participants’ self-reported English proficiency and Fenglish usage. The effect of English
familiarity on preference for past-on-the-left arrangements was then tested by performing a
INTUITIONS OF TRUTH AND BEAUTY 90
one-sample t-test separately for those with high vs. low English familiarity. The median of the
composite English familiarity was 3 out of 6. A score smaller than 3 was categorized as having
low familiarity (n =111) and a score larger than 3 was categorized as high familiarity (n =166).
Replicating Experiment 3b, Iranian participants preferred the metaphor-congruent
happy-above-sad arrangements at above chance level, M = 0.622, 95% CI [0.581, 0.664], t(267)
= 5.773, p < 0.001. This preference was observed in all of the eight pairs of valence-themed
photos, with seven being significant. Also replicating Experiment 3b, Iranian participants did not
show a preference for past-on-the-left arrangements, nor did they show a significantly reversed
preference for past-on-the-right arrangements, M = 0.496, 95% CI [0.460, 0.533], t(267) =
-0.200, p = 0.842. This is reflected in the item analysis. Iranian participants preferred past-on the
right for 3 of 8 pairs and past-on-the left for another 3 pairs, with none of the differences
significant; they had no directional preference for the remaining 2 pairs. Similar results were
obtained through logistic regressions (P(Preference
ij
=1) = logistic(γ
00
+ u
0j
)) with Mean
Predicted Probability
Happy-Up
=0.636, 95% CI [0.591, 0.682], p < 0.001, for the valence metaphor,
and Mean Predicted Probability
Past-Left
= 0.496, 95% CI [0.458, 0.534], p = 0.83, for the time
metaphor. Contrary to expectations, participants’ preference for the time-themed materials was
not moderated by self-reported familiarity with English. The proportion of time participants
preferred the past-on-the-left arrangements was 0.473, 95% CI [0.416, 0.530], t(110)= - 0.931, p
= 0.354 for participants with low English and 0.517, 95% CI [0.461, 0.573], t(115)= 0.605, p =
0.546, for participants with high English familiarity.
An exploratory logistic regression (P(Preference
ij
=1) = logistic(γ
00
+ γ
10
Eng_Fam
ij
+
u
0j
)) with English familiarity as a continuous variable yielded similar results. When English
INTUITIONS OF TRUTH AND BEAUTY 91
familiarity is at 0 (i.e., not familiar with English at all), the mean predicted probability of
preferring past-on-the-right arrangements was 0.465, 95% CI [0.352, 0.582], p = 0.559, and with
a one unit increase in English familiarity, the mean predicted probability increased to 0.475, 95%
CI [0.392, 0.560]. However, similar to the pre-registered median split analysis, this was not
significant, OR = 1.042, 95% CI [0.902, 1.204], p = .574.
In combination, Experiments 3b and 4 suggest that the horizontal ordering of time-related
stimuli does not influence the aesthetic preferences of native speakers of Farsi. This may reflect
that Farsi includes writing from right to left (for verbal material) as well as writing from left to
right (for numbers). In related research, Matoori et al. (2020) found that Iranians prefer
left-to-right arrangements when objects are labeled numerically. In addition, exposure to Western
media and culture, such as its left-to-right presentation of chronology, may have contributed to a
more flexible representation of the time-space relationship for Iranian participants.
Table 2. Results of Experiment 1-4.
1. The mean represents the mean proportion of congruent arrangements being chosen.
2. The congruent arrangement for Valence is happy-above-sad for both US and Iranian samples.
3. The congruent arrangement for Time is past-on-the-left for US samples and past-on-the-right
for Iranian samples.
4. * represents p < 0.05, ** represents p < 0.01, *** represents p < 0.001.
INTUITIONS OF TRUTH AND BEAUTY 92
5 Single-Paper Meta-Analysis
To calculate more precise effect size estimates, we conducted a single-paper
meta-analysis using the Comprehensive Meta-Analysis Software (Version 3.0; Borenstein et al.,
2013). Figure 2.4 shows a forest plot of the observed and estimated raw differences between the
proportion of congruent arrangements chosen and chance (0.50) for each metaphor and language
group. For the past-before-future metaphor, shown in the left-hand panel, we coded
past-on-the-left as metaphor-congruent for English speakers and past-on-the-right as
metaphor-congruent for Farsi speakers. For the good-is-up metaphor, shown in the right-hand
panel, we coded the happy-above-sad arrangement as metaphor-congruent for English and Farsi
speakers. Due to the small number of studies, tau-squared was pooled across studies, following
recommendations by Borenstein, Hedges, Higgins, and Rothstein (2010). A random effects
model was used and effect sizes were fixed across subgroups. Effect sizes were corrected for
small sample biases (Borenstein et al., 2010).
For the time metaphor, the overall raw effect size was 0.169, 95% CI [0.139, 0.199] for
English speakers, and 0.009, 95% CI [-0.024, 0.041] for Farsi speakers. The overall effect size
across the two language groups was 0.094, 95% CI [0.072, 0.116]. For the valence metaphor, the
overall effect size was 0.086, 95% CI [0.053, 0.118] for English speakers, and 0.124, 95% CI
[0.088, 0.160] for Farsi speakers. The overall effect size across both language groups was 0.103,
95% CI [0.079, 0.127].
INTUITIONS OF TRUTH AND BEAUTY 93
In addition, an analysis was run for English speakers (Experiment 1-3a) to examine if the
question wordings “Which arrangement do you think is better?”(Experiment 1 and 3a) vs.
“Which arrangement do you like more?” (Experiment 2a and 2b) lead to different patterns of
results. There was no significant difference in the patterns of results between the two wordings,
for both time- and valence-related conditions, Q (1) = 0.061, p = .804, and Q (1) = 2.407, p =
.121, respectively.
Figure 2.4. Results from the single-paper meta-analysis. The x-axis represents the raw
differences between the proportion of congruent arrangements and chance (0.50). Note that for
the time metaphor, the congruent arrangement is past-on-the-the-left for English speakers and
past-on-the-right for Farsi speakers. The effect sizes of each individual study are represented by
the diamond shape and the total effect sizes are represented by the triangle shape.
6 General Discussion
Our six experiments show that people prefer visual arrangements that are congruent with
applicable conceptual metaphors over arrangements that are not. This observation connects
theories of embodied cognition with theories about the metacognitive basis of aesthetic
INTUITIONS OF TRUTH AND BEAUTY 94
preference. According to conceptual metaphor theory (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980, 1999; for a
review see Landau, 2017), representations of abstract concepts (e.g., valence, time) are grounded
in sensorimotor experiences with the physical world as reflected in the mappings of valence on
vertical and time on horizontal space. Stimuli that are congruent with applicable metaphors are
processed faster than stimuli that are metaphor incongruent as has been observed for valence
(e.g., Meier, Hauser, et al., 2007; Meier & Robinson, 2004) and time (e.g., Ouellet et al, 2010
a,b).
Ease of processing, in turn, is a key input into judgments of aesthetic preference (Reber et
al., 2004). It underlies the influence of object (e.g., symmetry, contrast, clarity, prototypicality)
and perceiver variables (e.g., exposure history, expertise) that have long been the focus of
empirical aesthetics and predicts systematic effects of variables that are outside the scope of
traditional theories of aesthetics, including visual (e.g., Reber et al., 1998) and conceptual (e.g.,
Winkielman et al., 2003) primes. A processing fluency account of aesthetic pleasure thus
provides a parsimonious mechanism that connects variables that would otherwise have been
considered in isolation, with each requiring separate explanations. Going beyond previous
observations, the present experiments identify the influence of a variable that qualifies as a joint
characteristic of the object, the perceiver, and the cultural context, namely metaphor congruence:
perceivers prefer stimuli whose characteristics are congruent with the form in which a conceptual
metaphor is expressed in the perceiver’s culture over objects that are not. This observation
highlights that beauty is neither in the beholden nor in the eye of the beholder, but in the
perceiver’s processing experience, which is a joint function of object, perceiver, and context
variables (Reber et al., 2004; Schwarz, 2018).
INTUITIONS OF TRUTH AND BEAUTY 95
The current findings also suggest cross-cultural similarities in aesthetic preference to the
extent that an applicable conceptual metaphor is shared across cultures. In the present
experiments, both English and Farsi speakers share the valence-verticality metaphor, such that
good things are “up” and bad things are “down”, which results in a consistent preference for
metaphor congruent happy-above-sad arrangements. We expect similar effects for other widely
shared conceptual metaphors. For example, the conceptualization of power is also grounded in
verticality across many cultures, with high power represented higher in vertical space than low
power (e.g., Schubert, 2005; Tang et al., 2018; Wu et al., 2016). Hence, stimuli associated with
high power (e.g., photographs of influential world leaders) should have more aesthetic appeal
when placed high in space, whereas artworks associated with low power (e.g., photographs
depicting poverty) should have more aesthetic appeal when placed low in space. Similarly, as
brightness is associated with valence (e.g., Meier et al., 2004; Meier, Robinson, et al., 2007), the
appeal of positively (vs. negatively) valenced artworks should increase with their brightness.
Conversely, cultural differences in conceptual metaphors should result in cultural
differences in aesthetic preference. Although both English and Farsi speakers share the
time-space metaphor, they differ in their conceptualization of the direction in which time flows,
which follows the direction of writing and reading. English speakers consistently preferred
arrangements that placed a past-themed image before a modern-themed image. This preference
was consistently eliminated with Farsi speakers, although not fully reversed. As already
discussed, Farsi speakers’ indifference to the spatial placement of time-oriented stimuli may
reflect that Farsi speakers are familiar with both directions of reading and writing, due to verbal
materials written from right to left and numbers from left to right.
INTUITIONS OF TRUTH AND BEAUTY 96
Some caveats should be addressed. The present experiments used choice as a measure of
preference, consistent with a long tradition in behavioral science and decision research. A choice
format, in which both stimuli are presented simultaneously, also has the advantage of providing a
sensitive test of the influence of subjective processing experiences. From sensory perception to
judgment, people are more sensitive to changes in subjective experience than to stable states;
hence, fluency effects are more reliably obtained in within-participant than between-participant
designs (Wanke & Hansen, 2015). However, such manipulations can also provide participants
with increased insight into the hypotheses studied. We therefore included an open-ended
debriefing question that asked participants to tell us their thoughts about the studies. Not a single
participant mentioned “metaphor” or “valence”, and only a few mentioned concepts related to
“chronology” (7.9%, 4.7%, 1.5%, 5.7% in Exp.1, Exp. 2a, Exp. 2b, and Exp. 3a respectively).
This suggests that participants had very limited insight into the hypotheses tested and renders
concerns about demand effects mute. Nevertheless, studies with more indirect indicators of
preference -- assessing, for example, participants’ spontaneous affective response with
electromyography (Winkielman & Cacioppo, 2001) -- would be welcome.
More importantly, the observed influence of metaphor congruence on aesthetic
preference should hold for any conceptual metaphor. Testing this prediction with a broad range
of metaphors and diverse aesthetic stimuli provides a promising avenue for future research.
Finally, experienced processing fluency serves as information for a wide range of judgments
other than aesthetic preference (for reviews, see Alter & Oppenheimer, 2009; Schwarz et al.,
2021), including truth (e.g., Reber & Schwarz, 1999), novelty (e.g., Jacoby, Woloshyn, & Kelly,
1989), and risk (e.g., Song & Schwarz, 2009), among others. Hence, the fluency enhancing effect
INTUITIONS OF TRUTH AND BEAUTY 97
of metaphor congruent presentations may influence a broad range of judgments in ways that are
not predicted by the metaphor’s specific content.
INTUITIONS OF TRUTH AND BEAUTY 98
Chapter 4 - Linguistic Frequencies, Processing Fluency, and Liking
Chapter Preface
Chapter Four extends the analysis of metaphor congruency effects on aesthetic preference
to the influence of conventional linguistic expressions, another variable that has not been
considered by previous research. Many everyday expressions entail a particular ordering of
concepts (e.g., “salt and pepper”, “mom and dad”, “burger and fries”). Linguistic research
indicates that such expressions are processed faster when they follow the dominant ordering than
when they do not (Hutchinson & Louwerse, 2013), consistent with the general observation that
frequent exposure facilitates processing. Because ease of processing is a key driver of aesthetic
pleasure (Reber et al., 2004), visual materials that are consistent with the linguistic convention
may be more aesthetically pleasing than materials that are not. Three experiments tested whether
this is the case: Does the frequency with which ordered semantic concepts are encountered in
natural language influence the aesthetic pleasure derived from visual materials? We arranged
visual stimuli side by side (e.g., a picture of a “mom” and a picture of a “dad”) in an order that
did (mom-dad) vs. did not (dad-mom) follow the dominant ordering in one’s language. As
predicted, arrangements that were consistent with the more frequently encountered ordering in
perceivers’ native language were preferred. These findings provide the first evidence that remote
context variables, like the frequency of collocation orders in the corpus, can influence aesthetic
pleasure across sensory modalities.
INTUITIONS OF TRUTH AND BEAUTY 99
1 Chapter Introduction
In everyday language, many phrases are formed by two words and follow a particular
order. For example, English speakers say “law and order”, “pick and choose”, “come and go”,
but rarely “order and law”, “choose and pick”, or “go and come”. Such phrases, where concepts
and words are organized together in a relatively fixed order, are called “binomial pairs” (or
“frozen/irreversible binomials” if completely irreversible). Such binomial expressions have been
the subject of study and debate in linguistics for a century (e.g., Malkiel, 1959). While some
have focused on what determines the ordering and have proposed different semantic (e.g.,
gender, size, age, importance, and chronology), cognitive (e.g., mental accessibility; Goldberg &
Lee, 2021), and phonological (e.g., placement of vowels and consonants) rules (Benor & Levy,
2006; Mollin, 2012), others have studied how such ordering, regardless of what determines it,
may influence speakers’ mental processing of the concepts. The current research builds on the
latter. Specifically, given that binomial phrases are easier to process (e.g., Hutchinson &
Louwerse, 2013; Siyanova-Chanturia et al., 2011; Siyanova-Chanturia, et al., 2017) and that ease
of processing increases liking and aesthetic pleasure (for reviews, see Reber et al., 2004;
Schwarz, et al., 2021), do these linguistic conventions have downstream effects on people’s
liking of associated visual materials?
Previous research indicates that binomial pairs are processed faster when they follow the
dominant ordering than when they do not, consistent with the common observation that frequent
exposure facilitates processing. In an eye-tracking study where participants read sentences
containing binomial phrases, Siyanova-Chanturia and colleagues (2011) found that binomial
INTUITIONS OF TRUTH AND BEAUTY 100
expressions were read faster in their conventional form (e.g., “John showed me pictures of the
bride and groom dressed in blue”) than in reversed form (e.g., John showed me pictures of the
groom and bride dressed in blue). Similarly, Hutchinson and Louwerse (2013) observed that
sequential collocation frequency predicted how fast people were able to tell whether words in a
pair were related or not. When word pairs were presented in the collocation order that is more
frequent in the corpus e.g., “parent and child”; “doctor and patient”), participants responded
faster than when the order was reversed (e.g., “child and parent”; “patient and doctor”). This
processing advantage for conventional binomials has also been found in neurolinguistic research
by measuring electrophysiological responses in the brain (Siyanova-Chanturia et al., 2017).
Perhaps not surprisingly, the processing advantage afforded by repeated exposure also
holds true for novel phrases for which the ordering was arbitrarily determined by researchers.
For example, Conklin and Carrol (2021) asked participants to read short stories where existing
(e.g., “boys and girls”, “mom and dad”) and novel (e.g., “chicken and rabbits”, “bags and coats”)
binomials appeared at various frequencies and analyzed participants’ eye movements. Consistent
with previous research, existing binomials were read faster in their conventional order
throughout. Moreover, although reaction time for novel phrases in either order did not differ
initially, the arbitrarily assigned “conventional” order began to show a processing advantage
after only three to four exposures. In other words, repeated exposure to novel binomial phrases in
a particular order made participants slower at processing them in reversed order, even though the
concepts and meanings conveyed were equivalent in either order. This suggests that exposure
frequency plays a large role in the processing experience of conventional binomial phrases.
Indeed, Morgan and Levy (2016) found that direct experience of exposure (i.e., the relative
INTUITIONS OF TRUTH AND BEAUTY 101
frequency of binomials occurring in the conventional vs. reversed order in the corpus) is a
stronger and more robust predictor than abstract knowledge (e.g., ordering concepts based on
power status, time sequence, etc.) when predicting how long it takes people to read sentences
containing conventional binomial expressions and which which ordering they prefer. The latter
finding is also consistent with the well-established observation that mere exposure increases
liking (Zajonc, 1968).
In sum, there is converging evidence that binomial expressions are easier to process in
their conventional, and hence most frequently encountered, order. Consistent with the classic
mere exposure effect (Zajonc, 1968) and with previous research on processing fluency and
aesthetic pleasure (Reber et al., 2004), people prefer concepts in their conventional order
(Morgan & Levy, 2016). Building on this, the current research seeks to understand whether these
linguistic conventions can cross-modally influence people’s liking of visual materials. A growing
body of research has shown important similarities and interactions between the processings of
images and words (e.g., semantic priming can occur between pictures and words; Bajo, 1988;
Federmeier & Kutas, 2001; Labroo et al., 2008; Theios & Amrhein, 1989; Vanderwart, 1984),
which reflects that both involve semantic processing. Based on the research reviewed above, we
hypothesize that visual materials that are consistent with linguistic conventions, and are hence
processed more easily, will be more aesthetically pleasing than materials that are not.
1.1 Current Experiments
To test this hypothesis, we obtained frequency statistics of conventional expressions from
the Corpus of Contemporary American English (Davies, 2008, 2009, 2010) and identified
expressions where one ordering is drastically more frequent than the reverse ordering (see Table
INTUITIONS OF TRUTH AND BEAUTY 102
C1 in Appendix C for a full list of binomials used and the relative frequencies of their
conventional and reversed ordering). For example, the words “salt” and “pepper” occur 5892
times in the ordering “salt and pepper” but only 92 times in the ordering “pepper and salt”. We
presented photos depicting the objects in the expressions in arrangements that either matched or
mismatched the expressions. For example, a matching arrangement of “salt and pepper” places
the photo of salt to the left of the photo of pepper, whereas a mismatching arrangement places a
photo of salt to the right of a photo of pepper. Because a choice between two simultaneously
presented stimuli imposes no memory load and forced-choice tasks show minimal response bias
effects (Palmer et al., 2013), we assessed aesthetic preference by using a two-alternative
forced-choice paradigm. We arranged visual stimuli side by side (e.g., a picture of a “burger” and
a picture of “fries”) in an order that did (burger-fries) vs. did not (fries-burger) follow the
dominant ordering in English, and asked participants to choose the arrangement they liked more.
Experiments 1 and 2 tested whether native English speakers prefer arrangements that are
consistent with the more frequent orderings in English, and Experiment 3 tested whether
nonnative speakers of English living in the U.S. prefer arrangements that are consistent with the
orderings in their native language and/or their ordering in English.
2 Experiment 1
2.1 Method
Participants. We pre-registered to 1) recruit fifty participants from the University of
Southern California and to 2) exclude anyone who indicated that their native language was not
English, which resulted in forty-four participants.
INTUITIONS OF TRUTH AND BEAUTY 103
Design and Materials. Experiment 1 used six food-related pairs: pots and pans, salt and
pepper, burger and fries, table and chairs, fruit and vegetables, and ham and cheese, along with
eight filler pairs. The frequencies of matching and mismatching occurrences of the target pairs
were obtained from the Corpus of Contemporary American English (Davies, 2008, 2009, 2010)
and are reported in Appendix C2.
For each trial, participants were shown one congruent and one incongruent arrangement
and asked to choose the arrangement they like more. Half the time, the congruent arrangement
appeared above the incongruent arrangement, and half the time below. The placement of the
congruent arrangement for each trial was counterbalanced.
Figure 3.1. Example stimuli used in Experiments 1 (left) and 2 (right). Left: Salt and Pepper.
Right: Bride and Groom.
INTUITIONS OF TRUTH AND BEAUTY 104
2.2 Results and Discussion
The proportions of trials where the congruent arrangement was chosen were compared
against chance (0.5) with a two-tailed one-sample t-test. As predicted, participants preferred
visual arrangements that were consistent with the more frequently encountered ordering of the
corresponding words in the corpus of English, M = .636, t(43) = 3.66, p = .001. This pattern was
observed for five out of six pairs. These results provide preliminary evidence that frequencies of
occurrence in language can cross-modally influence liking of associated visual materials.
Experiment 2 aims to replicate the observed effects with different materials.
3 Experiment 2
3.2 Method
Participants. Based on the effect size of Experiment 1 (Cohen’s d = 0.551), a sample of
37 participants is required at an alpha level of .05 and power of .80. Since Experiment 2 is
conducted on Amazon Mechanical Turk, where there is more variability in the participants than
in an undergraduate subject pool, we pre-registered to recruit eighty participants from Amazon
Mechanical Turk. As in Experiment 1, we also pre-registered to exclude anyone who indicated
that their native language was not English, which resulted in seventy-seven participants.
Design and Materials. Experiment 2 used the same design and procedure as Experiment
1, but utilized different materials. Specifically, ten pairs of people- and nature-themed pictures:
mom and dad, bride and groom, king and queen, doctor and nurse, boys and girls, trees and
shrubs, apples and oranges, birds and bees, cat and mouse, and moon and stars, along with eight
INTUITIONS OF TRUTH AND BEAUTY 105
filler pair, were shown to participants. The frequencies of matching and mismatching
occurrences of the target pairs are again reported in Appendix C2.
3.3 Results and Discussion
As in Experiment 1, the proportion of trials where the congruent arrangement was
chosen was compared against chance (0.5) with a two-tailed one-sample t-test. Consistent with
the hypothesis and replicating Experiment 1, native English speakers again preferred
arrangements that were consistent with the more frequently encountered ordering in the corpus
of English, M = .584, t(76) = 4.083, p < .001. This pattern was observed for all ten target pairs.
The results from Experiments 1 and 2 suggest that liking of the same visual stimuli can vary as a
function of one’s language, as language is a natural manipulation of frequency and exposure,
resulting in more fluent processing of the stimuli.
Table 3.1. Mean proportion of trials where the congruent arrangement was chosen.
Experiment English Proficiency
of Participants
Reference Language Mean 95% CI t
Exp. 1 (N = 44) Native English 0.636 [0.563, 0.709] 3.66
Exp. 2 (N = 77) Native English 0.584 [0.543, 0.625] 4.083
Exp. 3 (N = 68) High Proficiency
English 0.576 [0.542, 0.610] 4.304
Native language 0.549 [0.514, 0.584] 2.735
Note: Reference language is the language based on which participants' preferences were
compared against.
INTUITIONS OF TRUTH AND BEAUTY 106
4 Experiment 3
Experiment 3 tested whether the preference for expression-congruent visual materials
replicates with nonnative speakers of English. Psycholinguistic research indicates that both
native speakers and high proficiency nonnative speakers of English are sensitive to the ordering
of conventional binomial expressions and their frequencies of occurrence in English, as indicated
by the faster reading speed when binomial expressions occur in their conventional rather than
the reversed order (Siyanova-Chanturia et al., 2011). For nonnative speakers, this processing
advantage increases as one’s proficiency in English increases, further indicating that the ease of
processing binomials is facilitated by frequency of exposure. Accordingly, for nonnative
speakers of English living in the U.S., the ordering in both their native language and English
should influence their preference for arrangements of associated visual materials. We therefore
hypothesize that they will prefer arrangements that are consistent with the orderings in their
native language and in English.
4.1 Method
Participants. Based on the effect size in Experiment 2 (Cohen’s d =.465), which was
conducted with native speakers of English, a sample of thirty-nine participants is needed for a
two-tailed one-sample t-test at an alpha level of .05 and power of .80. Since Experiment 3
recruited native speakers of various languages, we pre-registered to recruit eighty participants to
account for the additional variability in participants. We also pre-registered to exclude
participants who reported English as one of their native languages. Eighty undergraduates from
INTUITIONS OF TRUTH AND BEAUTY 107
the University of Southern California participated in Experiment 3, and twelve participants were
excluded from the analysis, resulting in a total sample size of sixty-eight.
Design and Materials. Experiment 3 used fourteen of the sixteen photo pairs that were
used in Experiment 1 and 2, along with fourteen filler pairs. The two pairs from Experiment 1-2
that were excluded in the current experiment are apples and oranges, and birds and bees, since
these are expressions specific to English.
Experiment 3 was conducted in English, following the same design and procedures as
experiments 1 and 2. Immediately after completing the two-alternatives forced choice
preference task, participants were presented with two additional tasks. First, they were asked to
comment on what they thought about the study, allowing us to assess their spontaneous
hypotheses. Next, they were shown the written word pairs (e.g., “Salt and Pepper”, “Mom and
Dad”) for the fourteen pairs they had seen pictures of, along with some filler pairs (e.g., “Water
and Fire”, “Sweet and Sour”) and asked to identify the correct ordering in English and in their
native language. Specifically, they were shown three response options, namely the two possible
orders of each pair (e.g., “Salt and Pepper” and “Pepper and Salt”) and, as a third option, “Can’t
tell”. The two different orderings of the pairs were randomized such that each order appeared as
the first response option half the time, and as the second response option another half of the time.
“Can’t tell” always appeared as the last response option. Participants were asked to select the
more frequent ordering in their native language (See Figure 3.2) for each pair, one at a time and
on separate pages. Next, they were asked to identify what they thought was the correct ordering
in English following the same procedure.
INTUITIONS OF TRUTH AND BEAUTY 108
Figure 3.2. An illustration of how participants were asked to indicate the more frequent ordering
in their native language.
At the end of the experiment, participants completed demographic questions (e.g., age
and gender). This section also asked them to report their native language(s) and how long they
have been living in the US, as well as to rate their English proficiency on a 6-point Likert scale
from “No proficiency” to “Near-native proficiency”.
4.2 Results
63% of the participants (43 out of 68) reported being native speakers of a Chinese
language (e.g., Mandarin, Cantonese), whereas the rest reported being native speakers of
languages such as Russian, Spanish, and Korean (for a full list of the languages, see Appendix
C2 in supplementary materials). Participants reported having lived in the U.S. for an average of
4.12 years, ranging from less than a year to twenty-two years. Overall, participants reported
being highly proficient in English, with an average reported proficiency of 4.956 when “No
proficiency” was coded as “1” and “Near-native proficiency” was coded as “6”.
The proportion of trials where the congruent arrangement was chosen was again
compared against chance (0.5) with a two-tailed one-sample t-test. As predicted, one-sample
INTUITIONS OF TRUTH AND BEAUTY 109
t-tests revealed that participants preferred the arrangements that were congruent with the more
frequent ordering in their native language (M = 0.549, t(66) = 2.735, p = .008), and this
preference was observed in the majority of participants for ten out of fourteen pairs.
Participants were also asked to identify what they thought was the more frequent ordering
in English. Consistent with previous research that highly proficient nonnative speakers are
sensitive to the ordering of binomials in English, participants were quite accurate in identifying
which orderings were more frequent in English, with a mean accuracy rate of 0.781, 95% CI
[0.748, 0.815]. Participants also preferred arrangements that were congruent with the orderings
that they assumed to be more frequent in English (M = 0.561, t(66) = 2.961, p = .004), as well as
arrangements that were congruent with the orderings that were actually more frequent in the
English corpus (M = 0.576, t(67) = 4.304, p < .001). The former was observed in the majority of
participants for eleven out of fourteen pairs, whereas the latter was observed in the majority of
participants for twelve out of fourteen pairs.
A follow-up logistic regression using hierarchical linear modeling further revealed that
when participants have lived in the US for “zero” years (intercept), preference for arrangements
congruent with actual English orderings was not significantly above chance (M
Probability
= 0.539, p
=.115). However, with each additional year spent in the US, the odds of choosing the congruent
arrangement with English increases by 3.82% (OR = 1.038, p = .032). This suggests that the
longer participants have stayed in the US, the more likely they are to prefer arrangements that are
congruent with the actual ordering in English, which is in line with previous findings that the
processing advantage of English binomials increases with one’s proficiency in English
(Siyanova-Chanturia et al., 2011).
INTUITIONS OF TRUTH AND BEAUTY 110
4.3 Discussion
The results of Experiment 3 suggest that the language(s) people speak influence their
liking of visual stimuli. Non-native speakers of English living in the U.S. preferred arrangements
that are congruent with their native language, while also preferring arrangements that are
congruent with English. Given that our participants have lived in the U.S. for many years, are
highly proficient in English, and completed the experiment in English, these results are in line
with previous linguistic research into the processing of binomials and with our hypothesis that
materials that are congruent with familiar linguistic conventions are more aesthetically pleasing.
It is worth noting, however, that most of the pairs (nine out of fourteen) seem to have the
same ordering in most people’s native languages as in English. It is possible, therefore, that there
are factors (e.g., size of the object, gender of people) other than linguistic frequency per se that
were influencing linguistic conventions as well as participants’ preferences. We return to this in
the general discussion.
5 General Discussion
In three experiments, we examined whether linguistic conventions of ordering binomial
concepts influence people’s liking of associated visual stimuli. Since conventional binomial
expressions have been shown to facilitate processing (Conklin & Carrol, 2021; Hutchinson &
Louwerse, 2013; Siyanova-Chanturia et al., 2011; Siyanova-Chanturia et al., 2017) and
processing experience is a major determinant of aesthetic pleasure (Reber et al., 2004; Schwarz
et al., 2021), we hypothesized that visual stimuli of paired concepts are aesthetically more
pleasing when arranged according to their conventional ordering in language. Experiments 1 and
INTUITIONS OF TRUTH AND BEAUTY 111
2 tested this hypothesis with native speakers of English by asking them to indicate their
preference for visual materials arranged in an order that is consistent vs. inconsistent with their
more frequent ordering in the corpus. Consistent with our hypothesis, results from both
experiments showed that visual materials were indeed liked more when they are arranged
according to the conventional ordering in English. Experiment 3 replicated these findings with
native speakers of various languages, who were also highly proficient in English, by asking them
to first indicate their preference following the same procedure used in Experiment 1-2 and then
report the more frequent ordering in their native language. Consistent with previous research and
with the hypothesis, Experiment 3 revealed that the ordering of binomials in both participants’
native language and English predicted their preference for how associated visual materials
should be arranged. Throughout, results from Experiments 1-3 show that the same visual stimuli
are liked more when their spatial arrangement follows the order in which the corresponding
semantic concepts appear in natural language, suggesting that linguistic conventions can
cross-modally influence the perceived appeal of visual materials.
Given that everyday language use is an ecological manipulation of exposure frequency,
these findings are compatible with the logic of mere exposure effects (Zajonc, 1968) and their
mediation through processing fluency (Reber et al., 1998). Indeed, there is converging evidence
that binomials are both easier to process (Conklin & Carrol, 2021; Hutchinson & Louwerse,
2013; Siyanova-Chanturia et al., 2011; Siyanova-Chanturia et al., 2017) and liked more (Morgan
& Levy, 2016) when appearing in their conventional order as indicated by linguistic corpus data.
Building on these previous findings, the current research provides initial evidence that this
INTUITIONS OF TRUTH AND BEAUTY 112
preference carries over to the visual domain and influences the aesthetic appeal of visual
materials.
While the goal of the current research is not to debate why concepts are ordered in a
particular way in the first place, which has been studied extensively in previous research (e.g.,
Benor & Levy, 2006; Goldberg & Lee, 2021; Mollin, 2012), some may wonder if those factors
(e.g., semantic knowledge such as size, gender, and status of the targets), rather than the repeated
exposure or the ease of processing afforded by it, contributed to the current findings. While this
is possible, evidence from previous research and additional analyses from Experiment 3 suggest
that direct experience of exposure to linguistic conventions predicts one's liking of associated
visual materials above and beyond those factors, whatever they may be.
First, novel binomial pairs become easier to process than their reversed order after just a
few exposures, even when the ordering is arbitrarily assigned and no initial difference in
processing speed is observed prior to repeated exposure (Conklin & Carrol, 2021). This indicates
that exposure alone facilitates the processing of ordered concepts. Second, this facilitating effect
of repeated exposure on processing experience is also evident when the exposure occurs in one’s
natural environment outside of laboratories, as the processing advantage of conventional
binomials in English increases with one’s proficiency in English (Siyanova-Chanturia et al.,
2011). Consistent with these findings, the current research also found that the likelihood of
nonnative speakers of English preferring arrangements that are congruent with the actual
ordering in English increases with the duration of time one has lived in the U.S. The final and
most direct evidence comes from research that pitted direct experience of exposure (relative
frequencies of each ordering in the corpus) against abstract knowledge (e.g., power status). It
INTUITIONS OF TRUTH AND BEAUTY 113
was found that both people’s processing time of conventional binomials and preference for their
ordering were more strongly predicted by the relative linguistic frequencies in the corpus than by
the abstract knowledge of the concepts (Morgan & Levy, 2016). Together, these findings provide
strong evidence that linguistic conventions influence the liking of associated visual materials
largely through their impact on one’s processing experience as a result of repeated exposure.
Going beyond earlier research, the current findings highlight that remote context
variables, like the frequency of the ordered collocation of semantic concepts in the linguistic
corpus, can influence aesthetic pleasure across modalities. Future research should examine
whether such effects extend to other modalities (e.g., Is burger and fries perceived as a tastier
meal than fries and burger?) and domains (e.g., Are advertisements more appealing when items
are arranged in ways consistent with their ordering in language?). In addition to its implications
for aesthetics and liking, the current research also serves as a first step to consider linguistic
collocation as a fluency variable that can potentially impact various judgments that have been
found to be influenced by processing experiences, such as judgments of truth, risk, and
consensus (for a review, see Schwarz et al., 2021; see also Chapter 1 of this dissertation). For
example, since ease of processing increases the likelihood that a claim is perceived as true,
claims containing binomial concepts may be more likely to be accepted as true when the
concepts are ordered in a way that is consistent vs. inconsistent with their ordered collocation
frequencies in the language (e.g., “Food and water/Water and food shortages affect almost 800
million people worldwide”). In a similar vein, people may perceive a higher social consensus for
the belief that “Men and women differ significantly in their ability to perform complex
mathematical calculations” than “Women and men differ significantly in their ability to perform
INTUITIONS OF TRUTH AND BEAUTY 114
complex mathematical calculations”. As perceptions of likeability, truth, consensus, and risks
have important practical implications for many domains, ranging from consumer research to
public opinion, these possibilities could be fruitfully examined in future research.
INTUITIONS OF TRUTH AND BEAUTY 115
Concluding Remarks
Aesthetic experiences are pervasive in life. They occur not only when we observe
artworks, but also arise as we form impressions of individuals and everyday objects, from the
people we encounter and the products we evaluate to environments we are situated in. While
traditional theorizing in aesthetics asked whether beauty resides in the object of evaluation or in
the eye of the beholder, psychological research suggests that it resides in the processing
experience of the perceiver, which is a function of object, perceiver, and context variables (Reber
et al., 2004; Schwarz, 2018). This perspective provides a coherent account of the influence of
variables that have long been known to be aesthetically pleasing (e.g., symmetry or contrast) and
variables that have not been considered of aesthetic relevance (e.g., metaphor congruency,
addressed in Chapter 3, and linguistic conventions, addressed in Chapter 4). Throughout, any
variable that facilitates easy processing increases, and any variable that impairs easy processing
decreases, aesthetic pleasure as reflected in self-reports of liking, psychophysiological measures
of positive affective response, and choice.
Just like aesthetic experiences, the need to decide whether information we receive is
accurate or not pervades our everyday lives. From the news we see in the media and medical or
financial advice we receive from professionals, to articles and videos we find on the internet or
rumors we hear in our social circle, we are bombarded with information every day. While we
may be quite confident in our ability to discern fact from fiction and truth from lies, mounting
evidence suggests that our assessments of truth are heavily determined by intuition rather than
reason. As reviewed in chapters 1 and 2, one variable that figures prominently in our intuitions
is the subjective experience of ease or difficulty when processing information. Things ring true
INTUITIONS OF TRUTH AND BEAUTY 116
and feel right when they sound familiar. Similarly, when a claim feels effortless to process,
people are more likely to nod along. In the post-truth era where disinformation campaigns are
armed with technology and the internet, this tendency makes us particularly vulnerable to
questionable claims and demands attention from scientists and the general public.
The research conducted and reviewed in this dissertation ties together intuitions of beauty
and truth, two important aspects of human experience, and shows that perceptions of beauty and
truth are two sides of the same coin. Chapter 1 provided a review of research on how intuitions
of beauty and truth are both influenced by the metacognitive ease or difficulty when processing
information. Chapter 2 showed that ease of processing is the main mechanism through which
related photos bias the perceived veracity of claims even though they do not provide any
evidence for them. Chapters 3 and 4 turned to aesthetic experiences by examining how
conceptual metaphors and conventional linguistic expressions, variables that have not received
much attention in the aesthetic literature, influence aesthetic preference based on their impact on
processing experience. Together, the current dissertation contributes to the understanding of
intuitions of truth and beauty and their consequences. To summarize this lengthy dissertation in
one sentence:
What is easy on the mind is beautiful, and true.
INTUITIONS OF TRUTH AND BEAUTY 117
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Appendix A
Chapter 2 Tables, Figures, and Supplementary Materials
1 Tables and Figures in Chapter 2
1.1 Tables
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1.2 Figures
Figure 1.1. Conceptual examples of different photo types paired with the same statement for both
the high and low imageability conditions. Photo of Betel: Creative Commons License
Attribution: Ananda Cilianuri. Photo of Leghorn: Creative Commons License Attribution:
Naetoru.
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Figure 1.2. The proportion of “true” responses to items that appeared with each photo type. Error
bars represent the 95% confidence intervals for the photo effects.
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Figure 1.3. Estimates of unstandardized effect sizes for experiments 1 and 2 and the single-paper
meta-analysis (Mcshane & Böckenholt, 2017). The size of the squares represents the average
sample size per condition; the horizontal thick and thin lines around the squares represent 50%
and 95% CI intervals, respectively. The top panel (a) shows the three main effect contrasts. The
middle panel (b) and bottom panel (c) show the effects of subject and referent photos,
respectively, within each imageability condition, followed by their interaction with imageability.
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2 Supplementary Materials for Chapter 2
2.1 Table of Commodities with Imageability Ratings
2.2 Preliminary Experiment Using Noncomparative Claims
This preliminary experiment tests predictions of the illusion-of-evidence account and
fluency account using non-comparative claims. Both accounts predict (i) that a given statement is
more likely to be judged true when it is accompanied by a nonprobative photo of the subject than
when it is not. The fluency account assumes that a given statement is more likely to be judged
true when it is easy to process relative to other statements and attributes the impact of a
INTUITIONS OF TRUTH AND BEAUTY 159
nonprobative subject photo to an increase in processing fluency. Accordingly, the truthiness
effect should (ii) be larger when the subject is unfamiliar and difficult to imagine than when it is
familiar and easy to imagine. In contrast, the illusion-of-evidence account assumes that all
related nonprobative photos are perceived as supportive evidence. It predicts, (iii) that the
truthiness effect is independent of how easily the subject can be imagined without a photo.
2.2.1 Method.
Participants. Based on the average size (Cohen’s d = .24) of truthiness effects produced
by related but nonprobative photos in Newman et al.’s (2015) within-subject experiments,
G*Power (Faul et al., 2007) indicated that 368 participants were needed with an alpha = .05 and
power = .90. We posted 400 time-slots on Amazon Mechanical Turk, limiting participation to
participants with United States IP addresses and approval ratings of 95% or higher for previous
HITS. Participants were compensated with $0.60; N = 396 participants completed the study and
none were excluded from data analysis.
Design. The current experiment followed a 2 (photo: yes, no) x 2 (imageability: high,
low) mixed design, with the presence of a photo as a within-subject variable and imageability as
a between-subject variable. Participants were randomly assigned to the imageability conditions.
Material and Procedure. Twenty-four commodities with low imageability and familiarity
ratings (e.g., saltpeter, yucca, tapis, etc.) and twenty-four commodities with high imageability
and familiarity ratings (e.g., cotton, strawberry, onion, etc.) were selected from the MRC
Psycholinguistic Database (Wilson, 1988). A non-comparative statement was created for each
commodity using the following structure: [Commodity] will have increased in price (three
months from today), adapted from Newman et al. (2018). For simplicity, participants were told in
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the instructions that the statements would make predictions about commodity prices three
months from today, but the phrase “three months from today” was not repeated for each
statement in the experimental phase. Each statement was presented either without a photo
(no-photo condition) or with a photo of the commodity (photo condition). Figure 1.1 shows
example statements (Table A1 in Appendix A provides all commodities used and their
imageability and familiarity ratings).
All participants saw twenty-four statements of either high or low imageability, of which
half were paired with a photo. Whether a given statement was presented with a photo or no photo
was counterbalanced and statements were presented in a randomized order.
Figure A1. Conceptual examples of statements appearing in the low (left) and high (right)
imageability conditions. Photo of Leghorn: Creative Commons License attribution: Naetoru.
Photo of Orange: Creative Commons License attribution: Larissalara400.
The experiment was conducted on Qualtrics. All participants were informed prior to
participation that they must use a computer rather than a smartphone. Those who connected with
a smartphone were automatically identified by Qualtrics and redirected to a page informing them
INTUITIONS OF TRUTH AND BEAUTY 161
that they could not participate on a mobile device. This was to ensure that all participants could
see the complete statements and the accompanying photo at the same time.
Participants were informed that they would see statements predicting the prices of
commodities in three months and that each statement would appear either with or without a
photo. They were to decide whether each statement is true or false based on their intuition. Next,
participants made a true/false judgment for each of the twenty-four statements by clicking a
“true” or “false” button below the statement. Each statement appeared on a separate page and
participants had to click “next” to move to the next page. In the end, participants were asked to
report their native language and whether they had looked up the commodities online during the
study.
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2.2.2 Results and Discussion. A sensitivity power analysis using G*Power indicates the
minimum effect size the experiment had 80% power to detect is Cohen’s d = 0.1996 or = η
𝑝 2
.0099. Figure B2 shows the proportion of times participants responded that the claims were true.
A mixed 2 (photo: yes, no) x 2 (imageability: high, low) repeated measures ANOV A showed that
statements were more likely to be judged true when presented with a photo, F(1, 394) = 41.980,
p < .001, = .096. This main effect replicates the standard truthiness effect first reported by η
𝑝 2
Newman et al. (2012) and is consistent with the illusion-of-evidence as well as the fluency
account.
Figure A2. The proportion of “true” responses to items that appeared with each photo type. Error
bars represent the 95% confidence intervals for the photo effects.
INTUITIONS OF TRUTH AND BEAUTY 163
In addition, a main effect of imageability, F(1, 394) = 8.382, p = .004, = .021, as well η
𝑝 2
as an interaction between photo and imageability, F(1,394) = 24.969, p < .001, = .06, η
𝑝 2
emerged. Consistent with the fluency account, follow-up tests confirmed that claims presented
without a photo were more likely to be judged true when the subject was easy to imagine (M =
.502, SD = .184) than when the subject was difficult to imagine (M = .399, SD = .220), t (394) =
5.033, p < .001, mean difference = .103, 95% CI [.062, .143]. Furthermore, adding a subject
photo to the claim increased acceptance in the low imageability condition, t(198) =7.579, p <
.001, mean difference = .128, 95% CI [.097, .159], but not in the high imageability condition,
t(196) = 1.137, p = .296, mean difference = .016, 95% CI [-.015, .048].
In sum, a given non-comparative claim is more likely to be judged true when its subject
is relatively easy to imagine. In the absence of photos, this advantages claims about high
imageability subjects over claims about low imageability subjects. Adding a subject photo of the
claim increases acceptance when the subject is otherwise difficult to imagine, but does not
further increase acceptance when the subject is already easy to imagine. These observations are
consistent with a fluency account of truth judgment and cannot be derived from an
illusion-of-evidence account. Recall, however, that easily imagined commodities are also
familiar commodities, reflecting the high natural correlation between familiarity and
imageability. It is therefore conceivable that familiarity with the subject of the claim limited the
impact of nonprobative subject photos independent of imageability. Experiments 1 and 2 render
this alternative unlikely.
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2.3 Omnibus ANOVA of Experiment 1 and 2
2.3.1 Omnibus ANOV A of Experiment 1. In addition to planned contrasts testing our
theoretical predictions, we also computed a 3 (photo condition) x 2 (imageability) mixed
factorial ANOV A. It revealed a significant main effect of photo type, F(2, 601) = 19.650, p <
.001, = .032, with subject photos resulting in a truthiness effect and referent photos resulting in η
𝑝 2
a falsiness effect, as well as a significant main effect of imageability, F(1, 601) = 8.618, p =
.003, = .014, with less imageable claims resulting in higher truth ratings overall. These main η
𝑝 2
effects are qualified by a significant interaction between photo type and imageability, F(2, 601) =
3.623, p = .027, = .006, consistent with the planned contrasts reported earlier. η
𝑝 2
2.3.1 Omnibus ANOV A of Experiment 2. In addition to planned contrasts testing our
theoretical predictions, we also computed a 3 (photo condition) x 2 (imageability) mixed
factorial ANOV A. Replicating experiment 1, significant main effects of photo, F(2, 595) = 9.221,
p < .001, = .015, and imageability, F(1, 595) = 5.246, p = .022; = .009, as well as a η
𝑝 2
η
𝑝 2
marginally significant interaction emerged, F(2, 595) = 2.612, p = .074, = .004. η
𝑝 2
INTUITIONS OF TRUTH AND BEAUTY 165
2.4 Accuracy of Identification of Commodities without Verbal Labels
We ran a separate study to determine whether participants can identify the commodities
shown in the photos when no labels are provided.
2.4.1 Method.
Participant. Eighty-one participants from Amazon Mechanical Turk were recruited, with
criteria and compensation identical to experiments 1 and 2. No participant was excluded from
data analysis.
Material and Procedure. The comparative claims used in the low imageability conditions
of experiments 1 and 2 were presented without labels. However, instead of judging whether the
statement was true, participants judged which of the two commodities mentioned in the
statement was shown in the photo. For example, the statement Marl will have increased more in
price than Tapis appeared with either a photo of Marl or Tapis and participants were asked “Do
you think this is Marl or Tapis?” After reporting their identifications for all claims, participants
were reminded of their answers and asked to rate their confidence (on a 0 to 100 scale) for each
identification made. The order of the comparison (e.g., whether Marl served as the subject or the
referent in the claim) and whether the photo depicted the subject or the referent were
counterbalanced, resulting in four versions of each statement. Each participant only saw one
version. The order of the questions was randomized.
INTUITIONS OF TRUTH AND BEAUTY 166
2.4.2 Result.
A one-sample t-test revealed that participants were able to identify the commodity
depicted by the photo significantly above chance, M
accuracy
= 0.607, SD = 0.154, t (80) = 6.261, p
< 0.001, although their overall confidence was low, M
confidence
= 43.838, SD = 18.492. This
provides evidence that participants were able to tell whether the subject or the referent was being
shown to them even without the label.
Interestingly, a one-sample t-test also revealed that when in doubt, participants were more
likely to say that the photo depicted the subject, M
subject
= 0.541, SD = 0.130, t (80) = 2.852, p =
0.006. This suggests that participants were more likely to expect to see a photo of the subject
than the referent when a photo is paired with a comparative claim, consistent with previous
research that comparative processes are dominated by the subject (1977; Tversky & Gati, 1978).
INTUITIONS OF TRUTH AND BEAUTY 167
2.5 Accuracy of Identification of Commodities without Verbal Labels
Table A2. Estimates of Unstandardized Effect Sizes from Single-Paper Meta-Analysis
Contrast type Contrast Estimate of
ES
95% CI
Main Effect Contrasts Subject vs. Referent .159* [ .120, .198]
Subject vs. No .087* [ .048, .126]
Referent vs. No -.072* [-.113, -.031]
Simple Contrasts Subject vs. No (low img.) .077* [ .050, .104]
Subject vs. No (high img.) .010 [-.017, .037]
Referent vs. No (low img.) -.008 [-.037, .021]
Referent vs. No (high img.) -.064* [-.091, -.037]
I = 0, 95% CI [0, 67.534].
Note. ES stands for effect size; "*" indicates estimates that have a 95% CI that does not include
zero.
INTUITIONS OF TRUTH AND BEAUTY 168
Appendix B
Chapter 3 Tables, Figures, and Supplementary Materials
1 Tables and Figures in Chapter 3
1.1 Tables
Table 2. Results of Experiment 1-4.
1. The mean represents the mean proportion of congruent arrangements being chosen.
2. The congruent arrangement for Valence is happy-above-sad for both US and Iranian samples.
3. The congruent arrangement for Time is past-on-the-left for US samples and past-on-the-right
for Iranian samples.
4. * represents p < 0.05, ** represents p < 0.01, *** represents p < 0.001.
INTUITIONS OF TRUTH AND BEAUTY 169
1.2 Figures
Figure 2.1. An example of horizontal arrangements of time-related photos (left) and vertical
arrangements of valence-related photos (right).
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Figure 2.2. Results of Experiment 1, 2a, and 2b. The error bars represent 95% confidence
intervals.
INTUITIONS OF TRUTH AND BEAUTY 171
Figure 2.3. Results of Experiment 3a and 3b. The error bars represent 95% confidence intervals.
INTUITIONS OF TRUTH AND BEAUTY 172
Figure 2.4. Results from the single-paper meta-analysis. The x-axis represents the raw
differences between the proportion of congruent arrangements and chance (0.50). Note that for
the time metaphor, the congruent arrangement is past-on-the-the-left for English speakers and
past-on-the-right for Farsi speakers. The effect sizes of each individual study are represented by
the diamond shape and the total effect sizes are represented by the triangle shape.
INTUITIONS OF TRUTH AND BEAUTY 173
2 Supplementary Materials for Chapter 3
2.1 Results of Exploratory Conditions from Experiments 1-4
Table B1. Results of Exploratory Conditions.
As Table B1 shows (see also Figures B1 and B2), participants consistently showed a
preference for past-on-top arrangements across the experiments. This may reflect the “past
before future” metaphor as both English and Farsi speakers read from top to bottom, despite the
horizontal direction of reading and writing of the two languages being different (i.e., English
speakers read from left to right, top to bottom, whereas Farsi speakers read from right to left, top
to bottom).
The preference for happy-on-the-left arrangements was inconsistent across experiments.
In experiment 1 and experiment 3a, English speaking participants preferred the happy-on-the-left
arrangement, potentially reflecting the fact that the sequence “happy and sad” is more common
INTUITIONS OF TRUTH AND BEAUTY 174
“sad and happy” in the English language (820 vs. 196 occurrences, respectively, according to the
News on the Web corpus: https://www.english-corpora.org/now/). This pattern was reversed for
Farsi speakers, although inconsistently. Future research may fruitfully investigate whether
linguistic sequencing plays a role in aesthetic preference.
Figure B1. Results of exploratory conditions in Experiments 1, 2a, and 2b. The error bars
represent 95% confidence intervals.
INTUITIONS OF TRUTH AND BEAUTY 175
Figure B2. Results of exploratory conditions in Experiments 1, 2a, and 2b. The error bars
represent 95% confidence intervals.
INTUITIONS OF TRUTH AND BEAUTY 176
Appendix C
Chapter 4 Tables, Figures, and Supplementary Materials
1 Tables and Figures in Chapter 4
1.1 Tables
Table 3.1. Mean proportion of trials where the congruent arrangement was chosen.
Experiment English Proficiency
of Participants
Reference Language Mean 95% CI t
Exp. 1 (N = 44) Native English 0.636 [0.563, 0.709] 3.66
Exp. 2 (N = 77) Native English 0.584 [0.543, 0.625] 4.083
Exp. 3 (N = 68) High Proficiency
English 0.576 [0.542, 0.610] 4.304
Native language 0.549 [0.514, 0.584] 2.735
Note: Reference language is the language based on which participants' preferences were
compared against.
INTUITIONS OF TRUTH AND BEAUTY 177
1.2 Figures
Figure 3.1. Example stimuli used in Experiments 1 (left) and 2 (right). Left: Salt and Pepper.
Right: Bride and Groom.
INTUITIONS OF TRUTH AND BEAUTY 178
Figure 3.2. An illustration of how participants were asked to indicate the more frequent ordering
in their native language.
INTUITIONS OF TRUTH AND BEAUTY 179
2 Supplementary Materials for Chapter 4
2.1 Relative Frequencies of Binomials Used in Experiments 1-3
Table C1. Relative Frequencies of Binomials Used in Experiments 1-3.
% of Occurrence in COCA
Expressions (Conventional vs. Reversed) Experiment
Pots & Pans 99% vs. 1% 1&3
Salt & Pepper 98% vs. 2% 1&3
Burger & Fries 95% vs. 5% 1&3
Table & Chairs 76% vs. 24% 1&3
Fruits & vegetables 88% vs. 12% 1&3
Ham & Cheese 91% vs. 9% 1&3
Tree & Shrubs 99% vs. 1% 2&3
Apples & Oranges 96% vs. 3% 2
Birds & Bees 93% vs. 7% 2
Cat & Mouse 99% vs. 1% 2&3
Moon & Stars 84% vs. 16% 2&3
Mom & Dad 97% vs. 3% 2&3
Bride & Groom 98% vs. 2% 2&3
King & Queen 96% vs. 4% 2&3
Doctor & Nurse 84% vs. 16% 2&3
Boys & Girls 83% vs. 17% 2&3
Abstract (if available)
Abstract
Previous research has shown that people’s judgments are influenced by the metacognitive ease or difficulty they experience when processing information related to the judgment at hand For example, materials that are easy to process are perceived as more positive, more familiar, more likely to be true, and as enjoying higher social consensus (for a review, see Schwarz, Jalbert, Noah, & Zhang, 2021). This dissertation investigates the influence of such metacognitive feelings on perceptions of truth and beauty, including a review of the current state of research and experiments that test novel hypotheses and advance this literature. Chapter 1 reviews the current state of research on how metacognitive ease or difficulty of processing influences judgments of truth and beauty. Chapter 2 discusses the role of metacognitive experiences in truth perceptions by examining the underlying mechanism of truthiness - a phenomenon where the perceived veracity of claims is influenced by accompanying photos, even when the photos do not provide any evidence for the claims. Chapters 3 and 4 turn to intuitions of beauty by identifying novel variables that facilitate processing and increase liking but had not previously received attention in the field of aesthetics. Together, the work presented in this dissertation shows that judgments of truth and beauty are often formed intuitively and influenced by similar mechanisms, that is, the metacognitive processing experiences that accompany thinking.
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Asset Metadata
Creator
Zhang, Lynn
(author)
Core Title
Intuitions of beauty and truth: what is easy on the mind is beautiful and true
School
College of Letters, Arts and Sciences
Degree
Doctor of Philosophy
Degree Program
Psychology
Degree Conferral Date
2022-05
Publication Date
03/06/2022
Defense Date
02/21/2022
Publisher
University of Southern California
(original),
University of Southern California. Libraries
(digital)
Tag
aesthetic preference,feelings as information,metacognition,OAI-PMH Harvest,perceived truth,processing fluency
Format
application/pdf
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Language
English
Contributor
Electronically uploaded by the author
(provenance)
Advisor
Schwarz, Norbert (
committee chair
), Lai, Mark (
committee member
), Miller, Lynn (
committee member
), Oyserman, Daphna (
committee member
), Wakslak, Cheryl (
committee member
)
Creator Email
lynnlzhangg@gmail.com,zhan306@usc.edu
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https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-oUC110768083
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UC110768083
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Tags
aesthetic preference
feelings as information
metacognition
perceived truth
processing fluency