Does rhyme make ideas more profound?
.
Via Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman’s book Thinking, Fast and Slow:
Put your ideas in verse if you can; they will be more likely to be taken as truth. Participants in a much cited experiment read dozens of unfamiliar aphorisms, such as:
Woes unite foes.
Little strokes will tumble great oaks.
A fault confessed is half redressed.
Other students read some of the same proverbs transformed into nonrhyming versions:
Woes unite enemies.
Little strokes will tumble great trees.
A fault admitted is half redressed.
The aphorisms were judged more insightful when they rhymed than when they did not.
I guess this is one of the reasons why otherwise uninspired lyrics can move us in music. And I know Johnnie Cochran would agree with it:
If the glove doesn’t fit, you must acquit.
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