Here ’s How We Perceive The Political Leanings Of Different Fonts

Photo: The serif font Jubilat was used on signs for Bernie Sanders’ 2016 presidential bid — though a new study suggests that sans serifs are generally seen as more liberal. Credit: Brett Carlsen/Getty Images. By Emily Reynolds Fonts can be very distinctive indeed. Even if robbed of their original context, it can be easy to identify the fonts used on the front of a Harry Potter book, adorning a Star Wars poster, or on the side of a Coca-Cola can, to name a few examples. But particular fonts can also leave us with other impressions: the font used to brand a beloved book, for example, has different emotional connotations to the one you use to type emails. And according to new research in Communication Studies from Katherine Haenschen and Daniel Tamul at Virginia Tech, particular fonts may also carry some political connotations, too. Research on political communication often focuses (quite understandably) on the content of campaign messages — what a candidate is saying and how they’re saying it. There have also been studies looking at the “personality traits” that various fonts can convey. Haenschen and Tamul looked at the intersection of these two topics: how fonts communicate either a liberal or conservative message, regardless of content. The first study looked at typeface classification — how bold or italic a font is, for example. A total of 987 participants were shown a short, politically neutral piece of writing (“the quick brown fox jumped ov...
Source: BPS RESEARCH DIGEST - Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Tags: Aesthetics Language Perception Political Source Type: blogs