A few weeks ago, Ange asked:

Are there ways in which poetry could or does both exploit its own dif­fi­culty as well as its plea­sures (prosodic, sen­sual, scenic) to max­i­mize its poten­tial as a unique cul­tural product—a “super-stimulus”—that can make us smarter and more sympathetic?

Today I came across a week-​old arti­cle in the Boston Globe that sug­gests one way to start answer­ing the ques­tion. Drake Ben­nett reports on research in cog­ni­tive flu­ency, “a mea­sure of how easy it is to think about something.” A fair amount of the research sounds like the sci­en­tific for­mal­iza­tion of common sense, and the pri­mary result of the stud­ies can hardly count as novel or sur­pris­ing: our brains like to take the easy route when­ever pos­si­ble. “Fluency is an adap­tive shortcut,” Ben­nett writes. “According to psy­chol­o­gists, it helps us appor­tion lim­ited mental resources in a world where lots of things clamor for our atten­tion and we have to quickly figure out which are worth think­ing about.”

More inter­est­ing is the way dis­flu­ency can be put to pro­duc­tive use, which smacks more than a little of Adorno’s defense of artis­tic and philo­soph­i­cal difficulty:

Alter and two other psy­chol­o­gists, Simon Laham and Geof­frey Good­win, also found that, when pre­sent­ing people with writ­ten descrip­tions of moral trans­gres­sions, increas­ing the con­trast between text and back­ground to make it easier to read the descrip­tion made people more forgiving.

To Alter, it’s a demon­stra­tion not so much of the power of flu­ency but of its oppo­site, what psy­chol­o­gists call “dis­flu­ency.” Even at the level of a trick­ier font, the expe­ri­ence of dis­flu­ency makes people wary and uncom­fort­able. That sen­sa­tion, Alter argues, is enough to make them less forth­com­ing and also less for­giv­ing in their moral judgments.

“Dis­flu­ency func­tions as a cog­ni­tive alarm,” Alter says. “It sets up a cog­ni­tive road­block and makes people think, and it trig­gers a sense of risk and concern.”

…

And a few stud­ies sug­gest that dis­flu­ency works well as a prompt to get people to think care­fully and catch mis­takes. Alter and Oppen­heimer found that using a more dif­fi­cult font can get stu­dents to do better on the Cog­ni­tive Reac­tion Test, a three-​question test that usu­ally trips up people answer­ing intu­itively. In another study, they found that dis­flu­ency also led people to think more abstractly. Schwarz and Song found that a dif­fi­cult font can dra­mat­i­cally increase the number of people who cor­rectly respond to the ques­tion, “How many ani­mals of each kind did Moses take on the Ark?” (The answer is “none” - Moses wasn’t on the Ark.)

In other words, to get people to think care­fully and to pre­vent them from making silly mis­takes, make them work to process the ques­tion: make the font hard to read, the cadence awk­ward, and the word­ing unfamiliar.

I don’t want to imply that pol­i­tics is the first, best, or only place to anchor Ange’s ques­tion, but it’s worth con­sid­er­ing that last para­graph in terms of the hard-​line Langpo argu­ment about the com­plic­ity of lin­guis­tic fea­tures like syntax and ref­er­ence in struc­tures of oppression—an argu­ment, I hasten to add, that I’ve always dis­liked. I’m not ready to change my mind on that front, con­vinced as I am that cultish mys­ti­fi­ca­tions are as sus­cep­ti­ble to polit­i­cal mal­prac­tice as sim­plis­tic nar­ra­tives. (Nor am I will­ing to con­cede that Langpo-​style lin­guis­tic dif­fi­culty is the only kind worth talk­ing about.) But I won’t deny that the extrap­o­la­tion is there for the making.

The sci­en­tists Ben­nett writes about also looked at the con­di­tions in which people pre­ferred cog­ni­tive flu­ency or its opposite:

Some researchers are also start­ing to look at the ques­tion of how to change people’s responses to cog­ni­tive flu­ency. Winkiel­man is part of a team of researchers who, in a forth­com­ing study, looked at the rela­tion­ship between mood and the desire for flu­ency. They found that happy people are less inter­ested in famil­iar, fluent stim­uli - in this case abstract visual pat­terns - than sad people. Accord­ing to Winkiel­man, this makes sense: When we’re unhappy, we seek out sta­bil­ity and a sense of safety; when we’re happy, we’re more open to the unfamiliar.

This squares not at all with my expe­ri­ence of read­ers. As a rule, the people I know who are happy, con­fi­dent, and secure in their per­sonal and pro­fes­sional lives like books writ­ten with the flu­ency of a front-​page news­pa­per arti­cle. And while not every reader of Gertrude Stein, William Gaddis, or David Foster Wal­lace is melan­cholic, unhappy, or depres­sive, those dis­po­si­tions sure seem common among the appre­ci­a­tors of will­fully alien­at­ing artworks.

My own ques­tion: what other fac­tors besides mood con­tribute to the pref­er­ence for cog­ni­tive disfluency?