Choose simplicity over artificiality is the sort of maxim that sounds like taste dressed up as wisdom, the kind of thing said by people who have decided that plain is virtuous and polish is suspect. Treated that way it is easy to dismiss. What makes it more interesting is that the preference is not merely aesthetic or moral. There is a body of psychological evidence suggesting that the mind actively rewards the simple and the genuine, and quietly penalises the contrived, in ways the people doing the judging rarely notice. The maxim, read carefully, is less a matter of taste than a description of how people actually process each other.
Why the simple thing is quietly persuasive
Start with simplicity, because its advantage is easy to underrate. The mind treats the ease of taking something in as a signal about the thing itself. In their review in Personality and Social Psychology Review, Adam Alter and Daniel Oppenheimer describe how processing fluency, the subjective ease with which information is taken in, shapes judgement across a wide range of situations, so that statements which are clearer, plainer, and easier to read are judged more true and more likeable than harder-to-process ones carrying the same content.
The implication is that simplicity is not the compromise it is often assumed to be. Plain language, uncluttered design, and an unpretentious manner are read by others as more trustworthy and more true, not because the audience has reasoned its way there but because ease of understanding feels like a marker of honesty. Complexity, by contrast, imposes a small tax on the person receiving it, and that effort tends to register as friction, doubt, or suspicion. This is worth stating with a caution, because fluency is a heuristic and not a truth detector: a simple, well-turned falsehood can feel true for exactly the same reason a simple truth does. So the fluency evidence does not say plain things are correct. It says plain things are believed and liked more readily, which is precisely why genuine simplicity is more powerful than most people expect, and why dressing a message up rarely helps it.
Why artifice tends to be detected
The other half of the maxim, the case against artificiality, has its own evidence, and the clearest example is a self-presentation move almost everyone recognises. In research published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Ovul Sezer, Francesca Gino and Michael Norton studied humblebragging, the practice of disguising a boast as a complaint or a show of modesty, and found across several studies that it reduced liking and perceived competence, performing worse than plain bragging and even worse than plain complaining, because observers read the disguise as insincere.
The mechanism is the point. Humblebragging fails not despite the effort put into it but because of that effort. The contrivance is visible, and once an audience infers that someone is managing them, the inference of insincerity does the damage, outweighing whatever the person hoped to gain. This generalises well beyond the specific move. The curated modesty, the strategic vulnerability performed for effect, the manufactured spontaneity, all of them share the same fragile structure: they depend on not being noticed as strategies, and people are better at noticing than the strategist assumes. Straightforwardness, even when it is less flattering, tends to be received better than a polished performance, because it does not invite the corrosive question of what is being managed.
What the maxim actually earns
Put the two findings side by side and the advice stops being a matter of taste. The mind leans towards what is easy to process and towards what reads as sincere, and it turns against what feels effortful to decode or contrived to impress. Simplicity tends to win the first contest and artificiality tends to lose the second, which is a reasonable evidence-based case for the maxim without any appeal to virtue at all.
It is worth being fair about the limits, though, because the slogan can be pushed too far. Not all simplicity is good: some of it is merely underdone thinking, and some situations genuinely demand complexity that cannot be flattened without loss. Nor is all self-presentation artifice; ordinary tact, courtesy, and adjusting how you come across are not the same as manufacturing a false impression, and treating every polished moment as a lie would be its own error. The useful reading is narrower and better supported. Where you have a choice between saying something plainly and dressing it up, or between being straightforward and performing a version of yourself, the evidence favours the plainer, more genuine option, not because it is nobler but because it is more likely to be believed, liked, and trusted. The artifice usually costs more than it returns.
