Your Brain Trusts What It Doesn't Have to Work For
The principle of processing fluency, and why it's quietly deciding who your stakeholders trust.
đ Hi, itâs Rinaldo. Every week or two, I share actionable strategies to help you clarify your message, drive decisions, and grow your influence at work regardless of your role or title.
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A lot of professionals think the way to sound credible is to sound impressive.
So instead of saying:
âUsers are dropping off because they canât find the product.â
They say:
âWeâre seeing meaningful attrition in conversion funnel stages two and three, which we hypothesize correlates with information architecture deficiencies.â
The first sounds like a person talking. The second sounds like a person trying to sound smart.
The instinct is that the second one earns more respect. More technical, more thorough, more credible.
It does the opposite.
A study with a title that proves its own point
In 2006, a Princeton researcher named Daniel Oppenheimer published a paper called âConsequences of Erudite Vernacular Utilized Irrespective of Necessity: Problems with Using Long Words Needlessly.â
He took writing samples, kept the content identical, and swapped simple words for fancier ones in some versions. Then he asked readers to rate the writerâs intelligence.
The simpler the writing, the smarter the writer was judged to be.
The effect held regardless of the quality of the original essay. It even held when the same essay was printed in a harder-to-read font. Anything that made the text harder to process made the author look less intelligent.
The mechanism has a name. Itâs called processing fluency.
Processing fluency in one line
Your brain runs a quiet shortcut: easy to understand feels true and credible, hard to understand feels like something is wrong.
You can see this in studies that have nothing to do with vocabulary.
Reber and Schwarz showed that the same factual sentence was more likely to be judged true when it was printed in high-contrast colors than in low-contrast colors. Same words. Different visual difficulty. Different verdict.
McGlone and Tofighbakhsh found that rhyming statements like âwoes unite foesâ were rated as more accurate than the same idea expressed as âwoes unite enemies.â Identical meaning. The rhyme made it feel more true.
The pattern is the same in every case.
The brain confuses ease of processing with quality of the idea.
If your message moves through someoneâs head smoothly, they assume itâs right. If it stutters, they assume something is off, and they quietly blame you.
This is whatâs killing your ideas in meetings
When a stakeholder reads your proposal or hears your update, their brain is doing two things at once. Itâs trying to understand what you said, and itâs deciding whether to trust you.
Every extra clause, every piece of jargon, every âleverage the operational framework to drive alignmentâ is a small tax on the listenerâs brain. The bigger the tax, the more they pull back. Not because they disagree. Because their brain is telling them, quietly, this person isnât being clear, so they probably arenât thinking clearly either.
You donât lose the room by being wrong. You lose it by being effortful.
The fix isnât dumbing things down
Most people hear âsimplerâ and think âless rigorous.â Those arenât the same thing.
Simpler doesnât mean shallower. It means making the idea travel from your head to theirs without paying a toll on the way in.
A few things that work:
Pick the easier word. If you can swap âutilizeâ for âuseâ without losing meaning, swap it. Every time.
Shorter sentences. Long sentences are where the processing tax piles up. Two short sentences travel further than one packed one.
Cut the qualifiers. âI think we should maybe considerâ is four words of throat-clearing before the point.
Lead with the payoff. Not the context, not the methodology. Tell them what matters first, then earn the right to explain how you got there.
Read it out loud. If you trip on it, your reader is tripping too.
If youâve read my posts on the âI believe that ___â test, or on payoff lines, this is the principle underneath all of it. Make the point clean enough that a reasonable person can grasp it the first time they hear it.
Thatâs not anti-intellectual. Itâs the highest form of preparation.
Why this is how you actually get buy-in
I write a lot about how the real work of persuasion happens before the meeting, through pre-sells, feedback, co-creation. All of that depends on one thing: your idea being something a stakeholder can pick up and carry.
If they canât repeat your point back to you in their own words, they canât sell it for you when youâre not in the room.
The goal isnât that they agree with you.
The goal is that they say your idea back to you, in their own language, like itâs theirs.
Thatâs what real buy-in sounds like. And processing fluency is what makes it possible.
The smart-sounding version impresses you in the moment you write it.
The clear version moves the work forward.
Pick the second one.
Good luck and be patient with yourself.
-Rinaldo
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