People reading one short story that was “literary” and one that was “science fiction” – identical stories except for small details like the protagonist using an airlock instead of a door – had wildly different reactions. The readers of the second kind of piece “assume the story will be less worthwhile, one that doesn’t require or reward careful reading, and so they read less attentively. This then lowers their scores on objective comprehension tests because they miss so much. Interestingly, they don’t even realise it, because they still report that the story required less effort to understand. It’s a self-fulfilling bias – except we can now show objectively that the weakness is with the reader, not the story itself.”