Less is More? The Impact of Discursive Complexity on the Evaluation of Moral Arguments
Federico Barrera-Lemarchand, Laura Victoria Lescano Charreau, Julieta Ruiz, Nuria Cáceres, Joaquín Navajas · Salud Ciencia y Tecnología - Serie de Conferencias · 2023
The belief that using longer and more complex words makes a text appear better written is very common among university students. However, previous literature demonstrates that this is a myth: writing with greater simplicity produces the best results. Processing fluency (subjective experience of ease of processing information) robustly affects people's judgment on a wide variety of social dimensions; in particular, linguistic fluency is positively associated with intelligence, persuasiveness, truthfulness, among others. Previous studies have focused primarily on how people process text at the individual level; however, in the real world, we must often interact with others to solve problems through argumentation and deliberation. In this paper we investigate the effect of linguistic complexity on the perceived validity of arguments about controversial moral issues, and on the likelihood of agreement. For this purpose, we conducted three studies showing that the use of long words induces worse argumentation in: - A large-scale behavioral experiment (N=10,548), where arguments with longer words receive lower ratings. - A behavioral study in which (N=768) participants deliberated in online chat rooms on moral issues, with the task of trying to reach agreement, and where the probability of reaching consensus was decreased by the use of longer words. - A randomized controlled experiment (N=600), where we observed that the use of long words significantly reduced perceived fluency, which in turn correlated positively with perceived validity. In conclusion, this paper presents converging evidence that the use of long words (an indicator of linguistic complexity) leads to a worse appraisal of moral arguments.