Designing persuasive health materials using processing fluency: a literature review <s> Limitations <s> Humans appear to reason using two processing styles: System 1 processes that are quick, intuitive, and effortless and System 2 processes that are slow, analytical, and deliberate that occasionally correct the output of System 1. Four experiments suggest that System 2 processes are activated by metacognitive experiences of difficulty or disfluency during the process of reasoning. Incidental experiences of difficulty or disfluency—receiving information in a degraded font (Experiments 1 and 4), in difficultto-read lettering (Experiment 2), or while furrowing one’s brow (Experiment 3)—reduced the impact of heuristics and defaults in judgment (Experiments 1 and 3), reduced reliance on peripheral cues in persuasion (Experiment 2), and improved syllogistic reasoning (Experiment 4). Metacognitive experiences of difficulty or disfluency appear to serve as an alarm that activates analytic forms of reasoning that assess and sometimes correct the output of more intuitive forms of reasoning. <s> BIB001 </s> Designing persuasive health materials using processing fluency: a literature review <s> Limitations <s> Previous research overwhelmingly suggests that feelings of ease people experience while processing information lead them to infer that their comprehension is high, whereas feelings of difficulty lead them to infer that their comprehension is low. However, the inferences people draw from their experiences of processing fluency should also vary in accordance with their naive theories about why new information might be easy or difficult to process. Five experiments that involved reading novel texts showed that participants who view intelligence as a fixed attribute, and who tend to interpret experiences of processing difficulty as an indication that they are reaching the limits of their ability, reported lower levels of comprehension as fluency decreased. In contrast, participants who view intelligence as a malleable attribute that develops through effort, and who do not tend to interpret experiences of processing difficulty as pertaining to some innate ability, did not report lower levels of comprehension as fluency decreased. In fact, when these participants were particularly likely to view effort as leading to increased mastery, decreases in fluency led them to report higher levels of comprehension. <s> BIB002 </s> Designing persuasive health materials using processing fluency: a literature review <s> Limitations <s> Prior research has shown that preference fluency (i.e., the subjective feeling that forming a preference is easy or difficult) systematically influences consumer choices. When deciding on an option feels difficult, or requires effort, consumers are likely to select a different option or defer the decision. We find that under conditions of narrative processing, difficulty in processing can actually improve preferences because more effort leads to more transportation, or immersion, into the story, thus enhancing brand evaluations. Three experiments demonstrate that the effect of preference fluency reverses when consumers think about a brand as part of a story. <s> BIB003 </s> Designing persuasive health materials using processing fluency: a literature review <s> Limitations <s> Abstract This research examines the effect of processing fluency on judgments of agent competence. In the context of service relationships, four studies reveal that the experience of processing difficulty, or disfluency, enhances expectations of agent-exerted effort and competence, which in turn increase expected service value. When reading information about a target service, consumers interpret the difficulty of processing information as a signal of the level of skill required to execute the task, which highlights the agent's expected utility. The authors explore several moderators of this positive effect of disfluency, showing that it is attenuated under conditions that decrease the relevance of consumers' subjective experiences and it may be reversed on measures of experienced (vs. expected) service value. <s> BIB004 </s> Designing persuasive health materials using processing fluency: a literature review <s> Limitations <s> Abstract This study explores effective ways for hospitality companies to communicate their corporate social responsibility activities with customers. The moderating role of processing fluency and psychological distance has been examined. The findings suggest that when customers are making a decision for the distant future (e.g., three months later), they are more likely to engage in abstract thinking and rely on metacognitive cues such as processing fluency. As such, a CSR message with high processing fluency will be preferred. On contrary, when customers are making a decision for the near future (e.g., next week), their information processing strategies are influenced by their concrete mental representation of the events. Under such circumstance, customers tend to have a more positive attitude and purchase intention after reading a CSR message with low processing fluency. Theoretical and managerial implications are discussed as well. <s> BIB005
Although the findings described in this review provide a promising starting point for further research into the PF effect in a health-care context, some limitations should be considered. It may be assumed that we retrieved the most important contributions dealing with PF using our strategy of combining a database search with an extensive manual search; however, we may still have missed some publications. In addition, most of the contributions detected in the search were studies in areas other than health. The applicability of findings from outside health care to a health-care context deserves careful consideration. Future studies need to investigate the fluency effect in the health-care context. Furthermore, some recent studies have focused on moderating variables of the PF effect, such as construal level and need for cognition BIB005 BIB002  . Additionally, recent studies have investigated the cases in which processing disfluency was efficacious BIB004 BIB003 BIB001  . These should be noted and explored to better our understanding of the PF effect.