Difficult-to-read? Better engagement

We're normally dead-set on finding presentational methods to make things easier to understand and access. And for important information that is clearly important and a good idea: safety info, for example, really needs to be apprehended easily and often quickly too.

However, here is research that indicates that if you want to increase people's engagement with arguments and to offset confirmation bias on their part, then making the material difficult to read is likely to help:

... use difficult-to-read materials to disrupt what researchers call the "confirmation bias," the tendency to selectively see only arguments that support what you already believe ... "Not only are people considering more the opposing point of view but they're also being more skeptical of their own because they're more critically engaging both sides of the argument,"

I think that this could be the basis for a learning strategy: to try and help us to appreciate different points of view, if we can get the material in digital format and change the font to something we find harder to read, we are likely to be helping ourselves to take in the argument more fairly and to give due weight to the strengths of someone else's argument.

Article to get summary and on-click: Difficult-to-read font reduces political polarity, study finds