Errol Morris: typography influences the trustworthiness of content

It´s here in black and white and other such famous sayings: we believe what is printed. Errol Morris, filmmaker of The Thin Blue Line and The Fog of War, has ´proven´ something else. Typography influences the trustworthiness of content. Especially typeface decides if we trust the contents of an article. Morris asked people to indicate if they thought that a certain article was true and found that people trust articles printed in Baskerville most. This is a phenomenon that many teachers already knew and taught in the good old days of cast metal typesetting: use serif fonts such as Baskerville, Times and Garamond when printing ´real´ information and a sans serif font for other information. Read about Morris´s experiment via this link.