Maybe you’ve simply heard of the book in passing. Or maybe you’ve picked up a copy for yourself, with it now sitting untouched on your bedside table. Whatever your personal experience with it, Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman is one of the most popular books in recent memory among academics, economists, and researchers. Unfortunately, Thinking, Fast and Slow is also known to be one of the most frequently abandoned books thanks to its density, four hundred and eighteen pages, and at times, nauseating detail. But the book is nevertheless worth everyone’s time, and not just because Kahneman won the 2002 Nobel Prize in economic sciences for his work on decision making.

Thinking, Fast and Slow is such a widely celebrated book because of its implications on nearly every aspect of our lives, and its insights into how we as human beings make decisions and act on them, both through snap judgements and more calculated thought. And because of those insights, the book has profound implications for communicators who wish to craft a compelling message, whether they make a living in public relations, media relations, or marketing.

As it turns out, there is a great deal we can learn from an economist about crafting a compelling message, all of it backed up by robust research and study. Still, four hundred and eighteen pages of density require much time and dedication. So, here’s what you need to know.

Above all, Kahneman highlights how our decision-making and conclusion-drawing processes are shaped by our minds’ tendency to look for the easiest way to make decisions or draw conclusions.

Our minds, as Kahneman’s and others’ research has shown, have a proclivity for what he calls cognitive ease – processes and related conclusions that are easy to arrive at and which reduce our cognitive load. When engaged in cognitive ease, Kahneman explains, we are quicker to accept a message as true and go along with its implications. In contrast, when our minds are engaged in any heavy lifting, what Kahneman refers to as cognitive strain, we are evolutionarily inclined to be more vigilant and suspicious, questioning a message and testing its validity. So, what can this teach us about crafting a persuasive message?

One lesson in crafting a persuasive message is to leverage repetition and establish familiarity.

“A reliable way to make people believe in falsehood is frequent repetition, because familiarity is not easily distinguished from the truth. Authoritarian institutions and marketers have always known this fact,” Kahneman writes.

Now, of course, this is not to say that we should be attempting to deceive our audiences or confuse the truth. But, it is a reminder that consistency is key, whether that’s through the messaging in a single piece of content or across an entire communications or marketing campaign. Making your point repeatedly, and making it consistent and easy to remember makes it more likely to be accepted by your audience – because our minds take comfort in the familiar.

Another lesson we can take from Kahneman is to ensure our message is more persuasive by employing plain language.

“If you care about being thought credible and intelligent, do not use complex language where simpler language will do,” writes Kahneman. “My Princeton colleague Danny Oppenheimer refuted a myth prevalent among undergraduates about the vocabulary that professors find most impressive. In an article titled ‘Consequences of Erudite Vernacular Utilized Irrespective of Necessity: Problems with Using Long Words Needlessly,’ he showed that couching familiar ideas in pretentious language is taken as a sign of poor intelligence and low credibility.”

You’ve heard it before, but here it is again – making a message simple and accessible isn’t dumbing down your content, it’s welcoming up your audience. Keeping the esoteric engaging, and the complicated compelling through plain language is at the heart of effective communications. Simply put, less is more isn’t just a truism.

But there’s more to learn from Kahneman, who also expands on how to make a message stick.

“In addition to making your message simple, try to make it memorable. Put your ideas in verse if you can; they will be more likely to be taken as truth,” writes Kahneman, before going into detail about experiments which have shown that phrases like Woes unite foes, and Little strokes will tumble great oaks, are judged as much more insightful than their respective counterparts of Woes unite enemies and Little strokes will tumble great trees.

It’s a signal that we should be calculated in our word choices and look for opportunities to be sparingly poetic in our writing, knowing that the creative use of language – whether through flow, rhyme, or repetition, can make us more persuasive. Consider, for example, the earlier sentence in this article in which we deliberately juxtaposed complicated and compelling, as well as esoteric and engaging, repeating similar sounds across concepts that function as opposites. Surely, that sentence would have been much less persuasive had we simply encouraged you to make the complicated easy to understand and the esoteric more familiar.

Next, Kahneman expands on association of beliefs and preferences in an audience’s assessment of a message’s truth.

He writes “How do you know a statement is true? If it is strongly linked by logic or association to other beliefs or preferences you hold, or comes from a source you trust and like, you will feel a sense of cognitive ease.”

Remember, now, that research has shown that the more we can do to induce cognitive ease, the more our message becomes persuasive and easy to accept. In this regard, taking advantage of association is a powerful tactic. This can take the form of conceptualizing a position, statement or argument around examples that would be familiar or relevant to our audience.

Consider, for example, an environmental organization that wishes to preserve freshwater supplies from the threat of pollution. Instead of simply underscoring the tens of thousands of gallons of waste being released into a waterway by a nearby manufacturing plant, they would be much better off to put the tens of thousands of gallons in a context that can be understood and visualized, explaining how many swimming pools the waste would fill, or how many households’ water could be contaminated. By making the message more relatable in this way – and more personal to residents, families, and voters – a logical and associative connection is established. As a result, the audience is better able to put something large into a clear perspective. This, in turn, allows the audience to engage in cognitive ease, and accept the message as true, persuasive, and worthy of attention.

Finally, moving beyond the content of the messaging, Kahneman builds further on the concept of cognitive ease, and gets into some surprising realities about the way our message should be displayed.

Kahneman notes that anything we can do to reduce cognitive strain – the heavy lifting of analysis, decision-making and drawing of conclusions – will help to make our message more persuasive. But this doesn’t just hold true for the content of our message, and also includes the legibility of fonts and the ease with which our message can be read.

“The general principle is that anything you do to reduce cognitive strain will help, so you should first maximize legibility,” notes Kahneman, stating that when two opposing statements are presented to test subjects, with one printed in regular text and one printed in bold, the text in bold is more likely to be believed.

Kahneman goes further on this point, stating “…if your message is to be printed, use high-quality paper to maximize the contrast between characters and their background. If you use colour, you are more likely to be believed if your text is printed in bright blue or red than in middling shades of green, yellow or pale blue.”

In essence, a message that is visually accessible is one that is also cognitively accessible and more likely to be accepted as true. Writers, content leads, graphic designers, and project managers, take note – the medium can strengthen the message.

Altogether, Kahneman’s insights lead us back to one core principle – easy is good. The more we can do to make our messaging, our ideas, and the way they are presented both cognitively and visually accessible to our audience, the more we will reduce strain and encourage acceptance of our message.

The art of persuasion, then, is just that – an art; but it is one that benefits from deliberate, selfless, and simple brush strokes.