Fluency heuristic is not everyone’s rule

April, 2011

Two experiments indicate that judgment about how well something is learned is based on encoding fluency only for people who believe intelligence is a fixed attribute.

It’s well-established that feelings of encoding fluency are positively correlated with judgments of learning, so it’s been generally believed that people primarily use the simple rule, easily learned = easily remembered (ELER), to work out whether they’re likely to remember something (as discussed in the previous news report). However, new findings indicate that the situation is a little more complicated.

In the first experiment, 75 English-speaking students studied 54 Indonesian-English word pairs. Some of these were very easy, with the English words nearly identical to their Indonesian counterpart (e.g, Polisi-Police); others required more effort but had a connection that helped (e.g, Bagasi-Luggage); others were entirely dissimilar (e.g., Pembalut-Bandage).

Participants were allowed to study each pair for as long as they liked, then asked how confident they were about being able to recall the English word when supplied the Indonesian word on an upcoming test. They were tested at the end of their study period, and also asked to fill in a questionnaire which assessed the extent to which they believed that intelligence is fixed or changeable.

It’s long been known that theories of intelligence have important effects on people's motivation to learn. Those who believe each person possesses a fixed level of intelligence (entity theorists) tend to disengage when something is challenging, believing that they’re not up to the challenge. Those who believe that intelligence is malleable (incremental theorists) keep working, believing that more time and effort will yield better results.

The study found that those who believed intelligence is fixed did indeed follow the ELER heuristic, with their judgment of how well an item was learned nicely matching encoding fluency.

However those who saw intelligence as malleable did not follow the rule, but rather seemed to be following the reverse heuristic: that effortful encoding indicates greater engagement in learning, and thus is a sign that they are more likely to remember. This group therefore tended to be marginally underconfident of easy items, marginally overconfident for medium-level items, and significantly overconfident for difficult items.

However, the entanglement of item difficulty and encoding fluency weakens this finding, and accordingly a second experiment separated these two attributes.

In this experiment, 41 students were presented with two lists of nine words, one list of which was in small font (18-point Arial) and one in large font (48-point Arial). Each word was displayed for four seconds. While font size made no difference to their actual levels of recall, entity theorists were much more confident of recalling the large-size words than the small-size ones. The incremental theorists were not, however, affected by font-size.

It is suggested that the failure to find evidence of a ‘non-fluency heuristic’ in this case may be because participants had no control over learning time, therefore were less able to make relative judgments of encoding effort. Nevertheless, the main finding, that people varied in their use of the fluency heuristic depending on their beliefs about intelligence, was clear in both cases.

Reference: 

[2182] Miele, D. B., Finn B., & Molden D. C.
(2011).  Does Easily Learned Mean Easily Remembered?.
Psychological Science. 22(3), 320 - 324.

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