Urban+Legends

Psychologists are merely starting to discover the extent on which cognitive fluency guides our thinking. Cognitive fluency is a measure of how easy something is to think about; people tend to prefer to think about things that are easy to comprehend rather than things that are more difficult, which makes sense (Bennett 1). For example, "[stock] shares in companies with easy-to-pronounce names...significantly outperform those with hard-to-pronounce names" (Bennett 1). People tend to subconcsiously take the easy way out of things; cognitive fluency is a shortcut that most people aren't even aware they are doing. "[In order] to get people thinking about a question, it may be best to present it less clearly [by using more difficult wording or a harder font to read] " this will force them to read it slower and think about what it is asking, rather than rushing through just to answer it (Bennett 1). Repition, clearer font, and rhyme are three ways to alter people's judgement of the truth.

In, "Humans Can Lick, Too", a teenage girl is left home alone while her parents worked late; she kept hearing a dripping noise so she would get up and turn all the faucets off, when she got back to bed she'd stick her hand under the bed and her dog would lick it. The dripping would continue so she finally located the source, it was coming from the kitchen cabinet so she opened it and saw her dog hanging upside down with its neck slit, on the cabinet door was written "HUMANS CAN LICK, TOO".