Beauty and truth, truth and beauty: Chiastic structure increases the subjective accuracy of statements

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, conventionally represented by the formula A-B-B-A. 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;” A = all, B = one). 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 predicted judgements of accuracy. Overall, the current work is consistent with the growing literature on stylistic factors biasing assessments of truth, using the distinctive stylistic pattern of antimetabole. We find that information communicated using an antimetabolic structure is judged to be more accurate than non-antimetabolic paraphrases.