Scientific American Mind Article:
ONE OF THE MOST FAMOUS American cartoonists of the 20th century was Rube Goldberg, who was widely known for his “Goldberg machines.” Each of these comical inventions depicted a complex set of “instructions” for completing what should have been a fairly simple everyday task. His Self-Operating Napkin, for example, required 13 sequential steps involving a parrot, a cigar lighter, a rocket and a sickle—along with various strings, springs and pendulums.
The cartoons were funny because they poked good-natured fun at a fundamental irony of human psychology. People will make even the simplest task much more complicated than it needs to be, yet all this overexplaining rarely helps. Indeed, the opposite is often true: Goldberg’s convoluted “how-to” instructions may make us laugh, but they also leave us feeling exhausted. If that is what it takes to use a napkin, why would we bother?
How Things “Feel”
Psychologists are very interested in the complex interplay of effort, motivation and cognitive crunching—the ease with which we think about a task in our mind. Is it possible that the simplicity (or complexity) of how a task is described and processed—whether it feels “fluid” or “difficult”—actually affects our attitude toward the task itself and ultimately our willingness to put our head down and work?
Two psychologists at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor decided to investigate this idea in their lab. Hyunjin Song and Norbert Schwarz wanted to see if they could motivate a group of 20-year-old college students to exercise regularly. They gave all the students written instructions for a regular exercise routine, but they used a simple yet ingenious method to make the how-to instructions either cognitively palatable or challenging: some received instructions printed in Arial typeface, a plain font designed for easy reading; others got their instructions printed in a Brush font, which basically looks as if it has been written by hand with a Japanese paintbrush—it is unfamiliar and much harder to read.
There are many ways to make something mentally palatable—or not. You can use clear, straightforward language or arcane vocabulary words; simple sentences or convoluted sentences with lots of clauses.