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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