not. It’s a probabilistic result, after all.) Benjamin Berman collected the data, did an initial analysis, and created bar graphs to illustrate the responses to the Deutsch passage. The total number of participants used for this analysis is 45,524. These graphs provide numerical totals for each category by typeface and level of confidence. Baskerville is the second tallest bar (just below Helvetica) in terms of agreement, but it has the most who strongly agree. Baskerville also is the second shortest (just below Computer Modern) in disagreement, but it has the fewest who strongly disagree. Berman then forwarded the data to David Dunning at Cornell. Here is Professor Dunning’s reply: Baskerville is different from the rest. I’d call it a 1.5% advantage, in that that’s how much higher agreement is with it relative to the average of the other fonts. That advantage may seem small, but if that was a bump up in sales figures, many online companies would kill for it. The fact that font matters at all is a wonderment. Dunning coded the responses, assigning weighted values to each of the six levels of confidence. strongly agree = 5 moderately agree = 3 slightly agree = 1 slightly disagree = -1 moderately disagree = -3 strongly disagree = -5. This second pair of graphs provide weighted totals. (Take the numerical totals for Baskerville. Multiply the figure for strongly agree by 5, the figure for moderately agree by 3, the figure for slightly agree by 1, etc., and then add them together. [9] ) Suddenly, Baskerville leaps off the page. It has both the highest rate of agreement and the lowest rate of disagreement. And it turns out that Marin Balaic was right. Comic Sans has the lowest rate of agreement, and one of the highest rates of disagreement. Are the results the product of chance? To address this question, Dunning calculated the p-value for each typeface. Grossly simplified, the p-value is an assessment of the likelihood that the particular effect we are looking at (e.g., the effect produced by Baskerville) is a result of a meaningless coincidence. [10] The p-value for Baskerville is 0.0068. Dunning explained, “We never completely rule out random chance as a possible cause of any result we see. But sometimes the result is so strong that chance is just very, very unlikely. What’s strong enough? If the p-value is 0.05 or less, we typically dismiss chance as an explanation by ‘industry
agreement.’ That is, we tolerate a 5 percent chance on any one comparison that what we are looking at is merely random variation.” But Dunning went even further. Since we are testing six typefaces, he noted that there “are 6, not 1, opportunities for me to be just looking at random chance. The conservative approach is to divide 5 percent by the number of tests. Thus, the p-value to dismiss chance falls to 0.0083.” Under 1 percent. I called Professor Dunning. DAVID DUNNING: Baskerville seems to be the king of fonts. What I did is I pushed and pulled at the data and threw nasty criteria at it. But it is clear in the data that Baskerville is different from the other fonts in terms of the response it is soliciting. Now, it may seem small but it is impressive. ERROL MORRIS: I am completely surprised by this. If you asked me in advance, I would have guessed Georgia or Computer Modern, something that has the imprimatur of, I don’t know, truth — truthiness. DAVID DUNNING: The word that comes to my mind is gravitas. There are some fonts that are informal — Comic Sans, obviously — and other fonts that are a little bit more tuxedo. It seems to me that Georgia is slightly tuxedo. Computer Modern is a little bit more tuxedo and Baskerville has just a tad more starchiness. I would have expected that if you are going to have a winner in Baskerville, you are also going to have a winner in Computer Modern. But we did not. And there can be a number of explanations for that. Maybe there is a slight difference in how they are rendered in PCs or laptops that causes the starch in Computer Modern to be a little softer than the starch in Baskerville. ERROL MORRIS: Starchiness? DAVID DUNNING: Fonts have different personalities. It seems to me that one thing you can say about Baskerville is that it feels more formal or looks more formal. So that may give it a push in terms of its level of authority. This is, of course, speculation. I don’t really know. What one would do with, when you get surprising results is you now have to think about, O.K., what do we do to take that back-ended speculation and support it with data? ERROL MORRIS: How surprised are you by this? DAVID DUNNING: I’m surprised that the damn thing worked at all — because you are conducting