If It's Difficult to Pronounce, It Might Not Be Risky: The Effect of Fluency on Judgment of Risk Does Not Generalize to New Stimuli
Abstract
Many previous studies showed that processing fluency, that is a metacognitive feeling of ease of cognitive processing, can serve as a basis for intuitive and automatic judgments in many different domains. Stimuli that are processed more fluently, such as, products and brands with names that are easier to pronounce, are, for example, usually judged to be more valuable, safer, more likeable, and more trustworthy than products and brands with names that are difficult to pronounce.
In line with these findings, one of the studies of judgmental effects of processing fluency showed that people perceive food additives and amusement-park rides with names that are hard to pronounce to be riskier. The present study explored the possibility that the association between disfluency and perceived riskiness might be in the opposite direction for some categories of stimuli, because of the differences in lay theories about relations between the ease of processing and the target attribute of riskiness in circumstances specific to these categories.
Although we initially found some support for this hypothesis for stimuli categories of war-torn cities or criminals, an improved analysis and further studies indicated that the observed effects were strongly dependent on the exact stimuli used and not on the general category of stimuli. We then used stimulus sampling methodology in designing further studies and showed that the association between fluency and perceived safety reported in the previous studies was not replicable with the newly constructed stimuli.
The results cast doubt on generalizability of the association between pronounceability and perceived safety and on the validity of previous fluency studies not using representative samples of stimuli in general. Our study thus clearly demonstrates the importance of treating stimulus as a random factor in experimental research designs.