💎 On hard to read fonts improving the care with which people read (Moses’s Arc)

If there is a dark side to fluency, might there be a bright side to its opposite, disfluency? Alter’s work suggests there might be. In one of his studies, he printed a simple, easy-to-read question: “How many animals of each kind did Moses take on the ark?” Many respondents said two. But when the question was printed in a harder-to-read font, respondents were 35 percent more likely to recognize that it was Noah, not Moses, who built the ark. The less legible font made people more careful readers.

Excerpt from: Hit Makers: The Science of Popularity in an Age of Distraction by Derek Thompson