The Metacognitive Alarm of Difficulty

When something is difficult that should act as a metacognitive alarm or signal that you don't understand it as well as you perhaps should. We've given people a number of different tasks. There's a famous task called the cognitive reflection test. People generally struggle with these questions. They're lured in, they give their intuitive response and they're incorrect. But if you present the questions in a font that's a little bit more difficult to read, we found that you can increase their accuracy pretty dramatically. You can influence the way people process information by presenting it in a disfluent format.