Our brain would tend to consider as “true” any message provided that it includes … the letters of the alphabet in the order in which we learned them. This is revealed by a study conducted at a University of Texas that says a lot about our ability to believe real lies!
Brands and the media compete in imagination to capture our attention and make us believe their messages. The good recipe to achieve this is perhaps to rely on unconscious reflexes of our brain linked to our first learnings. Researchers at the University of Texas have just identified one of the mechanisms capable of influencing our judgment: statements containing the first letters of the alphabet would be perceived as more truthful. This is shown by a study published in the Journal of Consumer Psychology.
To test what they call a “symbolic sequence effect,” they conducted an experiment in which a group of participants were presented with ten slogans whose wording and spelling followed a natural alphabetic sequence. Among the slogans were “Befferil relieves pain” or “Aspen moisturizes the skin”. In another group, these messages were transformed to no longer correspond to an alphabetical order: “Vefferil relieves pain” and “Vaspen moisturizes the skin”.
A higher veracity rating for messages following alphabetical order
The two groups then compared their estimate of the veracity of the information. And veracity ratings were significantly higher for messages following an alphabetical order, even though participants could not specify why this feeling of veracity was present.
To see if this recognition process could be modified, the researchers then played the first group a video clip in which an alphabet was sung normally and the second group a clip in which this alphabet was sung in reverse order. By then presenting them with a message following a reverse alphabetical sequence, they found that the evaluation of the level of “truth” of this message was higher for participants who had heard the alphabet sung backwards.
“The alphabet, a refuge for our brain”
How to explain that our brains are so “influenceable”? Response from Dan King, lead author of this study: “An alphabetic sequence embedded in a message, even if perceived subconsciously, gives the impression of being a refuge and our brain can make unconscious judgments that cause statements effects that follow this pattern are true”. In other words, we are ready to take as truth any message respecting an alphabetical order which, since it is one of our first learnings, is an order that reassures us!
Conclusion of the researchers: beware of reflexes that make us believe that anything resembling the order of the alphabet is a truth! As Dan King points out, “The alphabet is a random, arbitrary sequence we’ve learned and it can play tricks on the brain when it comes to making judgments…”
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