Font of Wisdom, Font of Truth

I became a Baskerville convert in 2012, the year film-maker Errol Morris ran an uncontrolled experiment in The New York Times. By his arrangement, an article about the risk of asteroids colliding with Earth surreptitiously appeared online in six distinct versions. They featured the same reassuring quote from British physicist David Deutsch, but in different fonts:

At the end of the article, readers were asked if Deutsch was right to say that “we live in an era of unprecedented safety.” Did the font affect agreement? The results were analyzed by David Dunning, a psychologist at Cornell:

Baskerville is different from the rest. I’d call it a 1.5% advantage [in conviction] relative to the average of the other fonts. That advantage may seem small, but if that was a bump in sales figures, many online companies would kill for it.

The science of the project could be questioned. Maybe the active variable was how much the typeface of the quote contrasted with the typeface of the rest of the articl…