Keep it simple, they say. Maybe not, or maybe not always.
I’m reluctant to generalize much from this study, but it’s interesting. University of Chicago psychology professor Aparna A. Labroo and Ph.D candidate Sara Kim wondered how people respond when you make something difficult.
They assigned each of their research subjects a “goal” – either feeling good or being kind – and then had them watch an ad for something that might help them reach that goal, either chocolate (for the “feeling good” group) or a children's charity (for the “being kind” group). The difference was that half of each group saw an ad that was clear and easy to read, while the other half’s ad was blurry and hard to read.
Whatever it is, I want it
If the “keep it simple” advice is always right, you’d think the folks who saw the clear, easy ad would respond to it more, right? That’s not what happened. The blurry ad for chocolate made subjects want chocolate more than the clear one did. And the blurry ad for the charity made subjects want to donate more.
Labroo and Kim acknowledge – and provide a useful list of – prior studies finding that the easier something is, the more we like it. But the reverse is true, they argue, when we’re trying to achieve a goal: “Perception of high effort arising from subjective difficulty of processing the means makes it appear highly instrumental for goal achievement.”
That feels right, when you think about it. When we’ve had to really work at something, we naturally think it was important to our success, if only because we’d hate to have to explain why we worked so hard to get it if it wasn’t important.
Keep it simple anyway
But when the goal in question is a jury’s effort to understand a complex case, don’t think this research means you should blur and obscure your most important points. After all, if the researchers had blurred their ads even more, at some point the subjects would have given up and stopped trying to understand them. You don’t know where that point is, and it’s different for each juror. You’re in trouble if you leave some behind in an effort to challenge the rest.
One lesson you probably can take from a study like this, though, is that you don’t need to oversimplify. Lawyers are often tempted to skip difficult areas, even if they’re central. You probably don’t need to do that. Jurors enjoy learning – and once they’ve gone to the trouble of learning what you’ve taught, this study suggests they may value it even more than if it had been easy.
The paper is “The ‘Instrumentality’ Heuristic: Why Metacognitive Difficulty Is Desirable During Goal Pursuit” (gotta love those social-science titles), in Psychological Science. At least right now, the paper is on line in full.
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(Photo by Casey Lehman at http://flickr.com/photos/islandfreedom/2891290813/; license details there.)