The psychology of reading print
Wherever they are, words are words, pictures are pictures, graphs are graphs, and numbers are numbers. They don’t change depending on whether you put them. They’re the same on paper, on a whiteboard, or on a screen. Except they’re not exactly. The symbols might not change, but what does change is how we understand and respond to them.
It turns out that we understand, process, comprehend and value ideas better when we’re reading something physical. Holding, reading, and turning printed pages help us appreciate and remember information, and it also affects how we feel about it.
Here’s the psychology of printing, and how you can use it to help you make a case, present your findings, or impress your audience.
Print keeps people’s attention
So much of our interaction with the world and each other is through electronic devices, and that has a lot to do with the versatility and convenience of phones, tablets, and laptops. You can pay bills, take photos, read the news, watch a show, contact your friends, and, yes, read documents, all on the same screen.
If the medium can do lots of things, chances are you’ll do lots of things with it. Having a laptop or smartphone is like being simultaneously at home, work, the bank, and the cinema. We’re in all of those places at once, but also in none of them completely — we’re getting notifications and messages to distract us from what we’re doing, and since we can effortlessly switch between activities, we do.
In short, when you read on a screen your attention is very likely in several places. With a page of printed information, you can do roughly one thing, and that, of course, is read it. When someone picks up their phone, or opens their laptop, they’re subconsciously getting ready to do a variety of things. When someone holds a page or a book, the unconscious understands that what is about to happen is reading and only reading.
If you want to give your piece a far better chance of keeping someone’s attention, print it.
People understand printed material better
The more important, complex, or lengthy your work is, the more you need to print it. People stand a much better chance of following and understanding your points if they’re reading it on paper.
When homo sapiens emerged as a species, there was no written word. That means our brains didn’t evolve to conceive words as 2D symbols — we essentially see words as objects, and text as the landscape they’re on.
What does that mean for communication and understanding? When people are remembering information they’ve read, they recall sentences with the same brain process as if they were remembering a landmark e.g. ‘the old tree in front of that crumbling wall at the start of the walk’. That means the great point you made will not just be ‘that clever conclusion’ but ‘that clever conclusion halfway down page four’.
If your writing is on a screen, with a continuous scroll instead of distinct pages, that orientation doesn’t exist, and neither does the level of recall; people remember information 70% better when they’ve received it in print.
Touch affects our experience
It’s safe to say our lives are less tactile than they used to be. Many objects got replaced by digital equivalents — most people stream films instead of owning DVDs (or VHSs!), subscribe to music services rather than keep a CD and record collection, and read news online instead of buying and reading newspapers.
That’s affected how we conceive and relate to media, and it’s an opportunity to use printed material to stand out — ‘zigging’ when most are ‘zagging’.
Touch and ownership
It appears that just touching something gives us a sense of ownership over it. That’s evolution at play again, this time encouraging us to guard the resources that we find. So, why not take advantage of that?
Print something and people can touch and hold it. They’ll feel like it’s theirs. That means immediately that is something worth holding onto, valuing, and defending. Just by distributing or presenting your work physically, you’ve increased people’s buy-in before they read a single word.
Weight and importance
Printing gives your work physical mass. That creates literal and figurative weight, which does the piece a lot of favours.
Firstly, it ‘exists’ in a much more tangible way than if it were only pixels, and because that’s rarer, it seems more important — it’s not just a drop in the digital ocean.
Secondly, if you’ve produced something lengthy like a report or a dissertation, the physical space it takes up and the weight of it in hand just emphasises its importance and authority.
That’s not just because more pages imply more research and information, but also because of an incredible psychological phenomenon that links physical properties to their metaphorical equivalents. Holding something physically warm makes us assess someone’s personality as ‘warmer’. Holding something that has a substantial physical weight increases our perception of someone’s ‘gravitas’.
Creating a physically substantial document automatically communicates intellectual substance.
Start impressing your audience with Printt
Whatever you’re creating, if it’s A4, we can print it. Whether it’s a one-page handout for your presentation, or a bound and laminated report, we’ll help you make it real.
There’s no minimum order — just set up a personal or business account, upload your files, and we’ll print them for you.
Get started now and get 30% off your first delivery order.