The rhyme-as-reason effect, or Eaton–Rosen phenomenon, is a

cognitive bias A cognitive bias is a systematic pattern of deviation from norm or rationality in judgment. Individuals create their own "subjective reality" from their perception of the input. An individual's construction of reality, not the objective input, ...

whereupon a saying or

aphorism An aphorism (from Greek ἀφορισμός: ''aphorismos'', denoting 'delimitation', 'distinction', and 'definition') is a concise, terse, laconic, or memorable expression of a general truth or principle. Aphorisms are often handed down by t ...

is judged as more accurate or truthful when it is rewritten to

rhyme A rhyme is a repetition of similar sounds (usually, the exact same phonemes) in the final stressed syllables and any following syllables of two or more words. Most often, this kind of perfect rhyming is consciously used for a musical or aesthetic ...

. In experiments, subjects judged variations of sayings which did and did not rhyme, and tended to evaluate those that rhymed as more truthful (controlled for meaning). For example, the saying "What sobriety conceals, alcohol reveals" was judged more accurate on average than: "What sobriety conceals, alcohol unmasks", sampling across separate groups of subjects (who each assessed the accuracy of only one of these statements). The effect could be caused by the ''Keats'' heuristic, according to which a statement's truth is evaluated according to aesthetic qualities; or the

fluency heuristic In psychology, a fluency heuristic is a mental heuristic in which, if one object is processed more fluently, faster, or more smoothly than another, the mind infers that this object has the higher value with respect to the question being considered. ...

, according to which things could be preferred due their ease of cognitive processing.

References

{{reflist, 35em Cognitive biases