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.
