Can a font motivate you to exercise or to pay more for a meal?

Fonts are just squiggles on a page or screen that spell out words, right? That’s their job and there’s nothing more going on behind the scenes, or is there? I started exploring the psychology of typography back in 2013. Some of the research I came across was surprising. Researchers had measured the impact fonts have on your subconscious. They’d demonstrated that fonts can motivate you and influence the decisions you make.

Which routine motivated students to exercise? A or B?

Psychologists gave two groups of 20-year-old students copies of an exercise routine. Each group had the same routine just printed in a different font. The students estimated how long the routine would take them and how likely they were to do the exercises.

Instructions A were printed in bog-standard Arial. Instructions B were in the more stylised Mistral. This is a paintbrush style chosen for being harder to read and less familiar. The assumption was that B would take longer to read and the information would feel harder to process.

Do you think the font made a difference to the students’ motivation to exercise?

Yes, it did. The students in the easy-to-read group A estimated that the routine would take just 8.2 minutes to complete. This was much faster than the 15.1…