Here is a concise summary of the provided text:
**Title:** The Power of Cognitive Ease: How Repetition Affects Perception of Truth
**Key Points:**
1. **Repetition creates cognitive ease**: Our brains process familiar information more easily, making it feel true and good.
2. **Familiarity ≠ Truth**: Repeated exposure to information, even if nonsense, increases perceived truthfulness (e.g., advertisements, celebrity fame).
3. **Cognitive ease sources**:
* Repetition
* High contrast and clear visuals
* Easy-to-read text
* Positive emotions
4. **Consequences**:
* Increased creativity and intuition
* Greater gullibility
* Potential for poor decision-making in critical thinking situations (e.g., science, analysis)
5. **Balancing Act**: Knowing when to rely on cognitive ease (e.g., everyday situations) and when to engage in more critical thinking (e.g., evaluating information, scientific analysis) is crucial in today's information-rich environment.
Here are the extracted key facts, numbered and in short sentences, excluding opinions:
**Cognitive Ease and Perception**
1. Repeated exposure to a phrase increases the likelihood of judging it as true, even without additional information.
2. The body temperature of a chicken is approximately 41°C, not 34°C.
3. Cognitive ease is a measure of how hard the brain is working, ranging from easy to hard.
**Familiarity and Truth Perception**
4. Things that are true often elicit cognitive ease, feeling familiar and effortless.
5. Examples of effortless truths include "fire is hot", "earth revolves around the sun", and "dogs have four legs".
**Repetition and Perception**
6. An experiment at two Michigan universities showed that nonsense words were rated more positively when displayed more frequently.
7. The more frequently a word appeared in a newspaper, the more people thought it meant something good.
8. Repetition of stimuli can create cognitive ease, even with nonsense words, Chinese characters, or random shapes.
**Cognitive Ease in Various Contexts**
9. Songs are judged more favorably after repeated listenings.
10. People are more likely to judge individuals in photos as likable after repeated viewings.
11. Companies with pronounceable abbreviations outperform those with unpronounceable tags on the stock market.
12. Lawyers with easily pronounced last names are over-represented in higher positions at law firms.
**Cognitive Ease, Legibility, and Decision-Making**
13. High-contrast images and clear audio reduce cognitive strain, increasing perceived truth.
14. People are more likely to choose a statement as true if it is written in legible, bold text.
15. A study found that 90% of people made at least one mistake on a clearly printed test, while the error rate dropped to 35% when the test was harder to read.
**Intuition, Critical Thinking, and Cognitive Ease**
16. Cognitive ease can aid creativity and intuition but also increases gullibility.
17. In areas requiring critical thinking (e.g., Physics), being more skeptical is crucial, which can be associated with unhappiness.
18. Analytical thinking takes more mental work and can be less pleasant than relying on cognitive ease.