Beauty and truth, truth and beauty: Chiasmus and the Keats heuristic

The Keats heuristic suggests that people find aesthetically pleasing expressions more accurate than mundane expressions. We test this notion with chiastic statements. Chiasmus is a stylistic phenomenon in which at least two linguistic constituents are repeated in reverse order, following an A-B-B-A pattern. Our study focuses on the specific form of chiasmus known as antimetabole, in which the reverse-repeated constituents are words (e.g., “all for one and one for all”). In 3 out of 4 experiments (N = 797), we find evidence that people judge antimetabolic statements (e.g., “Success is getting what you want. Happiness is wanting what you get.”) as more accurate than semantically equivalent non-antimetabolic statements (e.g., “Success is getting what you wish. Happiness is wanting what you receive.”). Furthermore, we evaluate fluency as a potential mechanism explaining the observed accuracy benefit afforded to antimetabolic statements, finding that the increased speed (i.e., fluency) with which antimetabolic statements were processed was misattributed by participants as evidence of greater accuracy. Overall, the current work demonstrates that stylistic factors bias assessments of truth, with information communicated using aesthetically pleasing stylistic devices (e.g., antimetabole) being perceived as more truthful.