Response to "Easy=True"

Posted by Sunloooo | Posted in

To begin with, I have to give credits to the title of the article. As far as the content concerns, the title does demonstrate how a simple and catchy phrase like itself tends to convince the readers. I do agree with what Drake Bennett suggested in the research to a certain extent, but I think we do need to consider the context to approve the theory.

I feel that the article fell into the fallacy of equivocation when it went back and forth between “easy” and “familiar” among different research. It is true that we tend to believe in the things that we are familiar with. It is not uncommon to buy things that we have heard of when we choose products. We behave so not for the sake of our appreciation to familiarity, but in the situations that require information to make decision, familiarity implies information to a certain extent. However, easiness might be part of the correlation, or might not. In certain context, short and catchy phrases are easy for us to remember and grow familiarity; in other occasions, a little complexity would be appreciated to make an impression. The most straightforward example is the fashion trend. There are times when fanciful colored dress that would catch attention and there are days when simple white shirts appear to be cool, depending on what the rest of the people wear on the street wear. So instead of saying easiness leads to memory retention and leads us to do things, it seems to me more accurate to conclude that people tend to remember things that are different from the rest, no matter it is easier or more complicated.

The point of “disfluency” is an interesting one. If you think about it, those simple terms that are easy to remember are also easy to forget. Just think about our names. Often times, we are concerned about complicated names that would give people a hard time to remember, but once people get it, it is hard to forget. Use the example of one of our classmates, Adan (hope you don’t mind), it is an easy-pronounce-name, so it is easy to remember; at the same time, it also requires a little processing to notice the “n” instead of “m” as the usual “ Adam” is, and that is what makes it hard to forget. If the advertisers are really looking to make a quick impression and also interest the audience, I think that is the strategy it should approach—easy but different, a combination of fluency and disfluency.

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