Fluency Heuristic

The fluency heuristic is a mental shortcut in which, when a person must judge which of two objects or options has a higher value on some dimension, the option that is processed more quickly, more smoothly or with less mental effort is inferred to be the higher-value one, independent of the option's actual merits. Applied to communication, the heuristic implies that an idea or argument presented in a more fluent, more polished or more easily understood way tends to be judged more favorably or taken more seriously than the same idea presented less fluently, regardless of whether its underlying content is actually stronger. Early research by the psychologists Larry Jacoby and Mark Dallas in 1981 showed that people could use the felt ease of perceiving a stimulus as a cue to whether they had previously encountered it, even without consciously remembering the earlier exposure, a finding later research connected to the broader fluency heuristic in judgment.