Fluency as a Cue to Authenticity

The quest for authenticity is a potent existential striving. Commonly defined as knowing and living in accordance with one’s perceived “true self,” we propose that authenticity may also be inferred from ambient feelings of fluency, or the subjective feeling of ease that corresponds to one’s immediate experience, mental processing, or physical action. We report four studies ( N = 1,465) supporting this idea. Study 1 shows that fluency during a recent activity predicts subjective authenticity beyond other relevant variables. Study 2 demonstrates that participants’ recalled fluent experiences also felt authentic. In Study 3, generating self-defining attributes under cognitive load reduced fluency and, subsequently, subjective authenticity. Finally, preregistered Study 4 manipulated fluency during a non-self-relevant task. Participants in the fluent condition reported greater subjective authenticity than those in the disfluent condition. We discuss how a phenomenological approach to subjective authenticity can integrate and complement recent theorizing about the nature of authenticity.