Cognitive friction occurs when your content is difficult for the brain to process. Research shows that listeners rate information as less true when they struggle to understand it.
This effect is driven by Cognitive Fluency: the easier your message is to process, the more credible it feels. Factors like background noise, poor microphone quality, mumbling, or overly complex sentence structures all increase processing load. Your listener’s subconscious does not separate the value of your message from the difficulty of hearing it.
In this micro-episode:
- How “truthiness” is linked to processing ease
- Why accents and audio quality affect credibility ratings (it’s not just prejudice)
- Practical ways to reduce cognitive load and boost authority
Resources:
Influence of accent on credibility: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0022103110001459
Find more episodes and subscribe at stereoforest.com/minute.
Transcript
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::Cognitive friction can lead your listener to rate the things that you say as less true. This effect comes
from processing difficulty of any kind in the brain, whatever makes the information harder to
understand. And that can vary from word choice to the way that it's spoken or even what format you're using
to deliver your content in. And the human brain, and it's often frustrating, is that it's not a way to
understand the information.
::way misattributes the truthiness of the content to that cognitive processing difficulty.
::Everything from words to the clarity of the visual images that you use, say something you use to advertise
your new episode with.
::This even impacts people who have a non-native accent.
::And research, where participants were even warned in advance this was a thing, determined that it wasn't
prejudice.
::it came down to this processing difficulty. And I'll put a link in the show notes for more information. This
is cognitive fluency at work. When something is really easy to process, that thing feels true to us. But
when something is really hard to process, it feels kind of like something might be up, even when it's
exactly the same otherwise. And this has a real big impact on our podcasts and videos.
::So any kind of background noise makes your message feel less true to the person hearing it. And this could
include things like poor microphone quality. That may make your ideas seem less credible to the person
listening. Or if you mumble or you have unclear enunciation. This makes your expertise feel a little bit
less expert. So think about the ads that you've seen for products where you couldn't really make out what
the text was.
::said or it was garbled ai text that trust for that product might drop due to this sort of perceived
carelessness
::something in your subconscious you don't even really realize it like if somebody puts out a podcast and
it's obvious that they didn't take the time to edit it i might feel that way because it's harder to process so
the listener's brain it doesn't separate the message from the way that it's delivered so your speaking
pace and your sentence
::All of these things matter because if you like talk too fast, it's going to
::strain the processing that it requires to listen to your words. If you use really complex or
::like a bunch of nested clauses within sentences, so your listener has to hold all these multiple ideas in
the working memory,
::all of that affects how they perceive it, how trustworthy it is. So your credibility,
::It depends on how easily the things that you say can be processed by those listening to it. So make your
messages fairly easy to understand and then the perception of how true they are actually goes up. I'm Jen
DeHaan. This is the Credibility Minute. For more episodes and to get in touch with me, head to
stereoforest.com slash minute.