dailylicious!

Apparently an article set in Baskerville is more believable that the same article delivered in Georgia, Helvetica, Comic Sans, Trebuchet, or Computer Modern.

A frequent contributor to the New York Times’s Opinionator blog, Morris encouraged readers to peruse a passage from The Beginning of Infinity, by physicist David Deutsch, on the unlikelihood that Earth will be destroyed by an asteroid. Then, he asked them to take a survey on whether they thought Deutsch’s statement was true, and how confident they felt in that conclusion. “Are You an Optimist or a Pessimist?” the post’s headline read.

But the poll was a cover—a ruse to get at the real question, how does typography influence our perception of truth? Morris tapped animator Benjamin Berman to develop a program that altered the typeface of the Deutsch passage, such that it appeared to each reader in one of the six randomly assigned typefaces mentioned above. Cornell psychology professor David Dunning helped design the test.