Fluency in Social Cognition

Abstract

Abstract This chapter reviews the social cognitive literature on fluency, which is a subjective metacognitive experience of felt ease during cognitive processes. The chapter summarizes the myriad ways fluency can be instantiated and notes its close connections with feelings of positivity and familiarity. It also summarizes the literature showing fluency’s impact on social judgments of others and the self, noting that fluency generally makes such judgments more favorable, and articulates moderators of this effect. Finally, it addresses fluency as a determinant of information processing, highlighting that fluency tends to elicit nonanalytic, superficial, automatic, or System 1 processing, whereas disfluency appears to motivate more analytic, deep, controlled, or System 2 processing. Overall, this chapter makes clear that fluency impacts a multitude of content areas of interest to social cognition researchers.