“The Keats Heuristic: Rhyme As Reason in Aphorism Interpretation”, Matthew S. McGlone, Jessica Tofighbakhsh1999-05-01 (poetry, cognitive bias)⁠:

Do people distinguish between the form and propositional content of a statement when evaluating its truthfulness?

We asked people to judge the comprehensibility and ostensible accuracy of unfamiliar aphorisms presented in their original rhyming form (eg. Woes unite foes) or a semantically equivalent non-rhyming form (Woes unite enemies).

Although the different versions were perceived as equally comprehensible, the rhyming versions were perceived as more accurate.

This ‘rhyme as reason’ effect suggests that in certain circumstances, people may base their judgments of a statement’s truth value in part on its esthetic qualities. Our results are consistent with models of persuasion which assume that people rely on heuristic cues to evaluate messages when they lack the evidence and/or motivation to scrutinize message content (eg. Eagly & Chaiken1993).

See Also:

• The Idiom Principle Revisited

• Listening speaks to our intuition while reading promotes analytic thought

• Logical Intuition Is Not Really About Logic

• Eliciting false insights with semantic priming

• The illusion of insight: detailed warnings reduce but do not prevent false ‘Aha!’ moments

• The dark side of Eureka: Artificially induced Aha moments make facts feel true

• The misunderstood limits of folk science: an illusion of explanatory depth

• Folkscience: coarse interpretations of a complex reality

• Liking words as a function of the experienced frequency of their occurrence