Errol Morris on photography.

This is the first installment in a two-part series.

1.

THE QUIZ [1]

The world is full of obvious things which nobody by any chance ever observes…

— Arthur Conan Doyle, “The Hound of the Baskervilles”

NOTE: This is a follow-up to my quiz that ran in The Times, “Are You an Optimist or a Pessimist?”

I would like you to read my essay and then take the quiz. It doesn’t matter whether you have taken it before. If you haven’t taken it before, please take it. If you have taken it before, please take it again.

Wikimedia Commons

Here is my confession. My quiz wasn’t really a test of the optimism or pessimism of the reader. There was a hidden agenda. It was a test of the effect of typefaces on truth. Or to be precise, the effect on credulity. [2] Are there certain typefaces that compel a belief that the sentences they are written in are true?

I picked a passage from David Deutsch’s second book, “The Beginning of Infinity” — a passage about “unprecedented safety” — and embedded it in my quiz for The Times, “Are You an Optimist or a Pessimist?”

If a one-kilometer asteroid had approached the Earth on a collision course at any time in human history before the early twenty-first century, it would have killed at least a substantial proportion of all humans. In that respect, as in many others, we live in an era of unprecedented safety: the twenty-first century is the first ever moment when we have known how to defend ourselves from such impacts, which occur once every 250,000 years or so.

Do you think Deutsch’s claim is true? Is it true that “we live in an era of unprecedented safety”?

( ) Yes: The claim is true ( ) No: The claim is false How confident are you in your conclusion?

( ) Slightly confident ( ) Moderately confident ( ) Very confident

I do not mean to dismiss the possibility of global catastrophe from asteroids or global warming or a host of other possible calamities — bioengineered viruses spreading out of control, Malthusian nightmares of overpopulation choking off life on the planet, etc. I wouldn’t want to dismiss even the most outrageous of millenarian fantasies, including Mayan predictions of the end of the world. [3] [4]

But for the moment, I was interested in something somewhat less apocalyptic.

We all know that we are influenced in many, many ways — many of which we remain blissfully unaware of. Could typefaces be one of them? Could the mere selection of a typeface influence us to believe one thing rather than another? Could typefaces work some unseen magic? Or malefaction?

Wikimedia Commons (Greg Robson)

Don’t get me wrong. The underlying truth of the sentence “Gold has an atomic number of 79” is not dependent on the typeface in which it is written. The sentence is true regardless of whether it is displayed in Helvetica, Georgia or even the much-maligned Comic Sans. But are we more inclined to believe that gold has an atomic number of 79 if we read it in Georgia, the typeface of The New York Times online, rather than in Helvetica?

I asked a friend, the psychologist Marc Hauser, about experimental results on typefaces. He recommended a blog post, “The Secret Life of Fonts,” written by Phil Renaud, self-described as “a Canadian blog design and web design enthusiast, with a particular admiration for web standards and CSS innovation. Ruby on Rails, xhtml/css, ajax, and a whole lotta love.” [5]

I’m nearing the end of my sixth semester of university, and things are going pretty well: I’m clearing a decent grade point average, enjoying my major, and just having wrapped up my semester’s “essay alley,” wherein all my courses require a term paper or two, and getting my results back telling me that I’m doing much better than usual. At first, I’m just relieved to be doing so well. Still, ever the skeptic, I start to wonder: what exactly am I doing differently now to be getting all these A-range paper grades all of the sudden? I haven’t drastically changed the amount of effort I’m putting into my writing. I’m probably even spending less time with them now than I did earlier in my studies, and while I guess you could argue that I’m probably just being a great example of practice making perfect, I’ve got my doubts; I even used to take courses concentrating on writing better essays, and in the time surrounding that, my grades were pretty low. Then it hits me: the only thing I’ve really changed since I’ve been getting these grades is… my essay font.

Renaud had written 52 essays in total. Eleven were set in Times New Roman, 18 in Trebuchet MS, and the remaining 23 in Georgia. The Times New Roman papers earned an average grade of A-, but the Trebuchet papers could only muster a B-.

And the Georgia essays? A solid A.

Well, would you believe it? My essays written in Georgia did the best overall. This got me thinking as to why that might be: maybe fonts speak a lot louder than we think they do. Especially to a professor who has to wade through a collection of them; Times seems to be the norm, so it really doesn’t set off any subconscious triggers. Georgia is enough like Times to retain its academic feel, and is different enough to be something of a relief for the grader. Trebuchet seems to set off a negative trigger, maybe just based on the fact that it’s not as easy to read in print, maybe on the fact that it looks like something off a blog rather than an academic journal. Who knows… So, be mindful of your target audience when you’re marking up a document, whether it’s a university essay or a commercial website. You never know just how loudly a font speaks.

But Renaud’s results are anecdotal. I wondered: is there an experiment that could decide this once and for all? Or barring that, at least throw some empirical light on the situation? Could the effect of typography on the perception of truth be assessed objectively?

Benjamin Berman (who designed the Multics emulation for my Times article “ Did My Brother Invent Email with Tom Van Vleck?”) created a program that changes the typeface of the David Deutsch passage. Each Times participant read the passage in one of six randomly assigned typefaces — Baskerville, Computer Modern, Georgia, Helvetica, Comic Sans and Trebuchet. The questions, ostensibly about optimism or pessimism, provided data about the influence of typefaces on our beliefs.

The test consisted of comparing the responses and determining whether typeface choice influenced our perception of the truth of the passage.

More than 100,000 people clicked on the page, and approximately 45,000 people took the quiz.

I gave the results to David Dunning, a professor of psychology at Cornell, who helped design the questions and the overall character of the quiz. [6] Here are the results. 39 percent of the test-takers were pessimists and found fault with Deutsch; 61 percent were optimists and agreed with him.

Benjamin Berman

I don’t know whether such a test was done 10 or 20 years ago, and whether the outcome would be at all different, but from the 45,000 responses, it seems that a clear majority now believes that science and technology can save us from a natural catastrophe — at least, from a nasty encounter with an asteroid. (Of course, it is unclear whether there is a majority that believe that science and technology can save us from ourselves.)

The quiz received more than 250 comments — many of them really funny and interesting — but almost no one caught on to the fact that people were reading the passage in different typefaces.

No one except for Michael McGahan from Denver, Colo. In a reply, he wrote,

If the “surprise” in the results has anything to do with Deutsch’s claim being presented in Comic Sans, consider me unsurprised. Specifically, something tells me that this is an A/B comparison experiment in which some people are presented the passage in a “formal” font, and others are presented the passage in an “informal” font, and the “optimism” results will be compared based on the presentation condition — otherwise, what is Comic Sans doing in the New York Times, which should know better? I look forward to the results! July 12, 2012 at 8:05 p.m.

2.

GREAT KINDNESS

I’d give my right arm to be ambidextrous.

— Old Proverb

G.C. Mares, “The History of the Typewriter”

Until about 150 years ago most people wrote out documents by hand. Since the advent of typewriters (from John J. Pratt’s pterotype in the 1860s to word processors in the 1980s), few people write by hand anymore, and we now have a vast array of typefaces available to us. It is an easy matter to change an entire document from Bembo to Garamond to Caslon to Palatino. We forget that written manuscripts, letters and journals were once unique objects often containing clues about the writer and the context of when and how they were written.

Can we separate the form of the writing from its content? Usually, it’s difficult if not impossible, but let me give you an extraordinary example of a page from a journal written during the Crimean War by Captain Mark Walker.

Library of Congress

The page from June 9-10, 1855, is notable because the handwriting changes suddenly, halfway down the page. On first inspection it appears to be written by two different people or perhaps someone with multiple personality disorder. The writing on the top half of the page is elegant but unreadable, the writing on the bottom half, awkward but entirely legible. The reason for the abrupt change becomes clear only through reading the journal. (You can also read the accompanying transcription.)

Courtesy of the Council of the National Army Museum, London

[Transcription of the upper-half of the journal page, dated June 9, 1855.]

…wounded Major Armstrong + Capt. Le Marchant 49 wounded + Lt Stone’s 55th killed. Today it is blowing very hard and the dust is abominable — have just heard of 4 officers [of the] 88th having been killed and Col. Sherman Major Dick-son + Capt. Foster [of the] 62nd Many I know and respect very much it is said the loss has been in the Divisions about 500 killed and wounded — besides many in the Light Division. Lord Raglan went toward the hospitals this evening visiting the wounded. There is a general order eulogizing the troops though it is whispered they did not do so well. Little I fear has been gained for a great loss — Saturday 9th. Still blowing very hard + dusty. The bateries [sic] are firing away. Yesterday the ships in harbor threw shells all day at the Mamelon, the Redan, and the Malakoff. [The Russians] fired very little. I fancy they are preserving their ammunition in case of an assault — a generous one I should think — hill down to the plains.

And then the serious firing began.

[Transcription of the lower-half of the journal page, dated June 10, 1855.]

Sunday 10th. Last night I went on with the reserves. Just as I got into the rear approach which joins the trench on the right heavy firing commenced at the Mamelon. While I was in the act of hurrying the men up a howitzer shell dropped beside me and exploded. A piece struck me on the right elbow and smashed it. I immediately tied a large handkerchief above the fracture and walked to the rear until I met some of the 55th who put me on a stretcher and carried me to Camp. I received great kindness from my new brother officers. After some time I was carried to a hut at the General Hospital where I now am. I was put under choloroform [sic] and on coming to consciousness I found my arm taken off above the elbow during the night and today I suffered a good deal of pain. The loss I have experienced is very great but I am very thankful that my life has been spared. The hut has been filled with sympathizing visitors particularly my [old comrades of the 30th…]

Compare the typed text with Captain Walker’s handwritten journal. The information is the same, but clearly, the emotional resonance of the words in the written journal is different. We feel the howitzer shell, the shattered elbow, the ripped tendons — ultimately the loss of the arm. And the writing, in a new unfamiliar hand, suggests an odd sangfroid, an equanimity in the face of horrifying adversity. [7]

Lambert, Weston & Son

I have often wondered about the visual element in text. Yes, we read the word “horse,” but we also see the letters, the typefaces, the shape of the word on the page. Is this not part of the meaning? It seems evident that we respond to different typefaces in different ways, but how many experiments have been done to determine the effect of typefaces on our perception of truth? Do we more readily accept (as true) sentences written in one typeface rather than another? Let’s look at the test results.

3.

THE RESULTS

O body swayed to music, O brightening glance, How can we know the dancer from the dance?

— W.B. Yeats, “Among School Children”

Michael McGahan, the author of the reply from the first part of this essay, noticed the use of Comic Sans. To him, that alone suggested that something was up. And then when I commented on the quiz on my Twitter account, Marin Balaic of Osijek, Croatia, provided the comment, “Maybe because the claim and questions are set in Comic Sans? It does have a reputation for rendering things ineffectual.” Balaic was aware that typefaces were in some way involved. But he didn’t go further than that. [8]

Wikimedia Commons

Balaic, like so many others, was firmly convinced — call it a feeling of typographic rectitude — that Comic Sans was “rendering things ineffectual,” or, to be fair to his argument, was at least reputed to have that effect. And Comic Sans had been recently in the news. On July 4, CERN announced its evidence for the existence of the Higgs boson — the particle predicted some 36 years earlier — in Comic Sans.

Fabiola Gianotti for CERN

Of the thousands of typefaces widely available, why Comic Sans? Nadine Chahine in Design Week wrote,

Of the thousands of fonts available to convey such a critical milestone, the scientists plumped for the Marmite of typography — Comic Sans. Within minutes of the news’ breaking ‘Comic Sans’ was trending on Twitter, with the majority of tweeters expressing their disgust at such an important announcement being conveyed in such a way.

And Patrick Kingsley in The Guardian wrote,

I opened Twitter this morning to find two things trending: “Comic Sans,” and “Higgs Boson” — the former a much-hated font, and the latter something to do with science. As unlikely as it sounds, the two things were linked… “Dear @CERN,” wrote one science buff with a taste for typography. “Every time you use Comic Sans on a powerpoint, God kills Schrödinger’s cat. Please think of the cat.” Another groaned: “They used Comic Sans on the Higgs boson powerpoint presentation … Nope there is no hope for mankind.”

Fortunately, I was able to get an answer. Lisa Randall, a Harvard physicist, kindly e-mailed Fabiola Gianotti on my behalf. Gianotti, the coordinator of the CERN program to find the Higgs boson, provided a compelling rationale for why she had used Comic Sans. When asked, she said, “Because I like it.”

The conscious awareness of Comic Sans promotes — at least among some people — contempt and summary dismissal. But is there a typeface that promotes, engenders a belief that a sentence is true? Or at least nudges us in that direction? And indeed there is.

It is Baskerville.

Cambridge University Library

Believe it or not, the results of this test even show a disparity between Baskerville and Georgia — two apparently similar serif typefaces.

My first thought was that it must have been a sampling error. A false positive — a result with no meaning. But it is not. It may be one of the true graven facts, like the ratio of the circumference to the diameter of a circle — fixed, immutable, necessary. (Well, maybe not. It’s a probabilistic result, after all.)

Benjamin Berman collected the data, did an initial analysis, and created bar graphs to illustrate the responses to the Deutsch passage. The total number of participants used for this analysis is 45,524.

These graphs provide numerical totals for each category by typeface and level of confidence. Baskerville is the second tallest bar (just below Helvetica) in terms of agreement, but it has the most people who strongly agree. Baskerville also is the second shortest (just below Computer Modern) in disagreement, but it has the fewest people who strongly disagree.

Benjamin Berman

Benjamin Berman

Berman then forwarded the data to David Dunning at Cornell.

Here is Professor Dunning’s reply:

Baskerville is different from the rest. I’d call it a 1.5% advantage, in that that’s how much higher agreement is with it relative to the average of the other fonts. That advantage may seem small, but if that was a bump up in sales figures, many online companies would kill for it. The fact that font matters at all is a wonderment.

Dunning coded the responses, assigning weighted values to each of the six levels of confidence.

strongly agree = 5

moderately agree = 3

slightly agree = 1

slightly disagree = -1

moderately disagree = -3

strongly disagree = -5.

This second pair of graphs provide weighted totals. (Take the numerical totals for Baskerville. Multiply the figure for strongly agree by 5, the figure for moderately agree by 3, the figure for slightly agree by 1, etc., and then add them together. [9] ) Suddenly, Baskerville leaps off the page. It has both the highest rate of agreement and the lowest rate of disagreement.

Benjamin Berman

Benjamin Berman

And it turns out that Marin Balaic was right. Comic Sans has the lowest rate of agreement, and one of the highest rates of disagreement.

Are the results the product of chance? To address this question, Dunning calculated the p-value for each typeface. Grossly simplified, the p-value is an assessment of the likelihood that the particular effect we are looking at (e.g., the effect produced by Baskerville) is a result of a meaningless coincidence. [10] The p-value for Baskerville is 0.0068. Dunning explained, “We never completely rule out random chance as a possible cause of any result we see. But sometimes the result is so strong that chance is just very, very unlikely. What’s strong enough? If the p-value is 0.05 or less, we typically dismiss chance as an explanation by ‘industry agreement.’ That is, we tolerate a 5 percent chance on any one comparison that what we are looking at is merely random variation.” But Dunning went even further. Since we are testing six typefaces, he noted that there “are 6, not 1, opportunities for me to be just looking at random chance. The conservative approach is to divide 5 percent by the number of tests. Thus, the p-value to dismiss chance falls to 0.0083.” Under 1 percent.

I called Professor Dunning.

DAVID DUNNING: Baskerville seems to be the king of fonts. What I did is I pushed and pulled at the data and threw nasty criteria at it. But it is clear in the data that Baskerville is different from the other fonts in terms of the response it is soliciting. Now, it may seem small but it is impressive.

ERROL MORRIS: I am completely surprised by this. If you asked me in advance, I would have guessed Georgia or Computer Modern, something that has the imprimatur of, I don’t know, truth — truthiness.



DAVID DUNNING: The word that comes to my mind is gravitas. There are some fonts that are informal — Comic Sans, obviously — and other fonts that are a little bit more tuxedo. It seems to me that Georgia is slightly tuxedo. Computer Modern is a little bit more tuxedo and Baskerville has just a tad more starchiness. I would have expected that if you are going to have a winner in Baskerville, you are also going to have a winner in Computer Modern. But we did not. And there can be a number of explanations for that. Maybe there is a slight difference in how they are rendered in PCs or laptops that causes the starch in Computer Modern to be a little softer than the starch in Baskerville.

ERROL MORRIS: Starchiness?

DAVID DUNNING: Fonts have different personalities. It seems to me that one thing you can say about Baskerville is that it feels more formal or looks more formal. So that may give it a push in terms of its level of authority. This is, of course, speculation. I don’t really know. What one would do with, when you get surprising results is you now have to think about, O.K., what do we do to take that back-ended speculation and support it with data?

ERROL MORRIS: How surprised are you by this?

DAVID DUNNING: I’m surprised that the damn thing worked at all — because you are conducting an experiment in an uncontrolled environment. Who knows what’s going on at the other end of a computer screen? Their kids could be screaming in the background for all we know. It could be two a.m. It could be two p.m. They’ve had their coffee. They haven’t had their coffee… The font is on their desktops. There is just a ton of stuff out there that could obscure any results whatsoever. That’s why I made sure to have those six levels of confidence —

ERROL MORRIS: Because —

DAVID DUNNING: Because, basically, there are two different types of questions you can ask in a survey. You can ask yes/no. Do you agree with X? And that is a rather crude question, because if a person says yes, you don’t know if they are saying, “Yes, God damn it,” or if they are saying, “Ye-es.” [in a meek voice]. They both qualify as yes. However, if you ask about gradations of the “yes” (or gradations of agreeing), then if there is a more subtle phenomenon going on you have a better chance of catching it. You catch people going from “Ye-es” to “Yeah.”

ERROL MORRIS: And what did you learn from this data?

DAVID DUNNING: That people either agree or they disagree. They are not hovering around the middle at all. They choose a decisive yes or no. But I thought that some fonts would be rejected rather than that one font was going to be the winner.

ERROL MORRIS: For example, Comic Sans would be a loser.

DAVID DUNNING: Exactly.

ERROL MORRIS: The loser font.

DAVID DUNNING: The inappropriate font. What is this font doing here? [laughter] But no. That doesn’t seem to have been the case. And that’s why you do the studies. Sometimes you get exactly what you expect. O.K., great. You publish them. The fun happens when you do a study that comes out in a way that no one would ever have expected. Now you’ve got to sit back and say, how do I explain that? Can I explain that?

To be continued…

[1] An illustration of the Torino Scale from “0” where the likelihood of an asteroid collision with the Earth is so low as to be effectively zero to “10” where a collision is certain, capable of causing global climatic catastrophe that may threaten the future of civilization as we know it, whether affecting land or ocean. Such events occur on average once every 100,000 years, more or less. It reminds me of a trip to Glen Canyon Dam. You can stand on the top and feel the weight, the immense power of the water trapped behind the dam. There have been constant leaks, but the engineer in charge told me not to worry, that the dam was designed to last 100 years.

[2] The geneticist Eric Lander suggested the word “credulity,” which comes closer to describing what I was looking for.

[3] I interviewed (in The Times) the leading authority on that issue, and he assured me that the current calculations are off and we have at least another 60 years left.

[4] Robert Trembley in a comment on my quiz provided his own list.

* Over 9K NEOs recently Discovered; last large one hit a century ago. We ARE due — it’s a matter of WHEN, not IF. Smaller ones plow into the earth’s atmosphere DAILY.

* Haven’t had a global pandemic in a century (remember SARS, the swine flu, and bird flu — we really dodged a bullet with those.) * Terrorists flying planes into buildings. * Continual State of War for a decade. * Nukes that fit into a briefcase. * No major super-volcano eruptions in hundreds of thousands of years (we’re due). * Entertainment Business creating rootkit viruses. * Horrible light pollution. * Climate change. * Anthrax in a letter. * Awful parenting. * 799 Superfund sites. * Several recent Tsunamis. * Bride burning. * Nobody going to jail for causing the crash of 2008. … We aren’t as “safe” as Mr. Deutsch would like to believe; the human race RE-ALLY has not been seriously challenged in several hundred years. I’m usually NOT that much of a pessimist (really!), but remarks like Mr. Deutsch’s seem a bit ignorant of both history, AND recent events.

[5] “The Secret Life of Fonts”

[6] I interviewed Dunning for another essay for The Times, “The Anosognosic’s Dilemma: Something’s Wrong But You’ll Never Know What It Is.”

[7] The campaign journal is part of the collection of the National Army Museum. It appears in the exhibition catalogue “A Most Desperate Undertaking: The British Army in the Crimea (1854-6),” edited by Alastair Massie. Massie told me that later in the journal Walker’s crabbed writing be-gan to change back into something like the unreadable cursive he wrote with his right hand.

[8] Balaic is a designer and commercial filmmaker.

[9] These figures may seem arbitrary, but their purpose is to give statistical weight to the differences between “strongly,” “moderately” and “slightly.” Dunning also assigned the values, 3, 2, 1, -1, -2, -3. It doesn’t change the results.

[10] I will provide an appendix on the statistical results that presents David Dunning’s findings, When speaking about p-values I hesitate to use the c-word, “cause.” David Hume would object. Better to speak about random versus significant.