Dangerous words
by Patrick | Published in Faster Better Stronger, Featured | 17 Comments
What would you think if I told you that the food you have in your cupboard contains either the preservative Hnegripitrom or Magnalroxate, and that one of these was dangerous? Unless you are a chemist, the answer reveals a lot about how your brain makes decisions when you don’t have a clue about the details.
The good news is that Hnegripitrom and Magnalroxate are not really food additives. In fact they aren’t even real words.
And yet we can form an opinion about these two pseudo-compounds and decide which one is more dangerous. But how do we decide this?
The fictional food additives are from a recent set of experiments where researchers presented their names to people and asked them to rate how dangerous they thought they were on a scale of 1 to 7. If you’re like most people with an English speaking background then you rated Hnegripitrom as more dangerous than Magnalroxate.
But if you are like most people then you don’t have an advanced degree in organic chemistry, so what are you basing your judgment on?
The researchers had a clue and designed this experiment to test one simple thing: The link between ease of pronunciation and how our brain judges risk.
They demonstrated that we tend to rate things that are hard to pronounce as more risky than things that are easy to pronounce. In this case the easier to pronounce chemical seemed less dangerous than the harder to pronounce one. At first glance this sounds rather silly, but a great example of this in the real world is a drug you have almost certainly taken before: N-acetyl-p-aminophenol.
This sounds like something you’d varnish a table with while wearing a facemask and gloves. It’s definitely hard to pronounce and it sounds way too dangerous to ask people to swallow it. Instead, you probably know this drug as Acetaminophen. That’s still kind of hard to pronounce though, so the pharmaceutical companies gave it the even easier and friendlier name of Tylenol.
But this odd decision-making process doesn’t just apply to judgments about drugs. Pushing the experiment further the researchers asked, “Do easy to pronounce rollercoaster rides seem less dangerous and/or less fun than hard to pronounce ones?”
The amusement park question offers a neat twist on the chemical conundrum we just looked at. We are still judging how risky we perceive the ride, but the outcome is a desirable one – we don’t want to go on the boring rollercoaster ride but at the same time we don’t want to throw up.
Surprisingly the results were the same: Hard to pronounce rides were rated as more dangerous (there’s a risk of getting sick) but also much more fun than the rides that easily rolled off the tongue. The conclusion we can draw from this is fascinating: It doesn’t matter if we want it to be dangerous or safe, the harder to pronounce words are always seen as being riskier.
So why does our brain feel more comfortable with smooth words when we don’t have any other information with which to make a decision?
Fake familiarity feels fine
The experiments above are in line with a long held observation that we tend to underestimate the risk involved with things that we are familiar with and to exaggerate the danger associated with things that we have little experience with.
But as the chemical conundrum demonstrates, you don’t even have to have real prior exposure to be “familiar” with one thing over another. The easier to pronounce words require less effort for our brain to process, memorize and understand. Because familiar things are also easier for the brain to process than unfamiliar things, when we encounter something new and it’s easy to comprehend we erroneously associate it with familiarity. We are more fluent with easily pronounced words than hard ones. Sit them side-by-side and we get a strong sense of fake familiarity.
Fluency = familiarity = frequency
Fake familiarity isn’t the only way our brains decide if something is dangerous or safe. What if we talk about something that’s not a chemical in our food, something that’s not immediately categorized as dangerous or safe? What if it’s kind of boring like laundry detergent?
Familiarity now becomes a simple numbers game. Repeated exposure to something neutral leads to a preference to choose that over anything new.
New things are associated with uncertainty and uncertainty requires more effort from our brain to understand. Stand this next to something familiar and it’s no mystery which one we think is more dangerous. As with fluency, our brain will choose the “less dangerous” path when we don’t have any other information, and the laundry detergent with the most TV ads wins the hearts and minds of the undecided.
This happens a lot with social communication too. Hearing advice or statements that are easy to understand are perceived as “common knowledge” and the feeling that you have heard this before, leading to the assumption that this is a popular view, and one that is true.
Fake it till you make it
Judging risk is often an intuitive process rather than an analytical one – especially when you don’t have a lot of information. It may seem shallow or frivolous to make decisions based on fake familiarity. But because our brain works this way it probably gave us an evolutionary edge. Our Stone Age cousins certainly didn’t have all the facts about which of the thousands of different rocks would make the best spear point. What do you do if you can’t find the type of stone you used last time? Stick to rocks that seem familiar and you are much more likely to build a spear as strong as the last one you made.
Of course familiarity isn’t the only way our brain makes decisions, just the one we’re discussing here. But you can forget the idea of the rational brain because purely rational decisions don’t exist. The only important thing is that we should always able to make a decision – good or bad. Being unable to decide what to do would be a crippling pathological condition: imagine if we spent a week dedicated to deciding what brand of laundry detergent to buy?
Our instincts and emotions are peppered throughout the decision-making process and are often the means to bring an end to our analysis.
Dangerous implications
It’s not just big sciencey sounding words and amusement park rides. It’s very likely that when presented with anything new that we make our first judgment based on how familiar we find it. Beyond words and language, we judge things with little information all the time. A strange looking building, a confusing drawing, charts with lots of difficult to understand information. The harder it is to process, the riskier it seems.
Are you preparing a presentation? Are you a marketer? Do you have a blog?
If you present new information to people, ask yourself one question: Are you showing people something safe or dangerous?
To keep up with the safest and easiest to pronounce information subscribe to the RSS or Email updates. No big sciencey words, I promise.
original image by iwouldstay remixed by Patrick. (You read the ingredients, right?)
February 9th, 2009
February 9th, 2009at 3:33 pm(#)
I think this obviously applies to names of people too.
Names from different cultures seem a bit more risky.
We tend to be more distrustful of people who’s names we can’t pronounce that easily.
February 9th, 2009at 4:22 pm(#)
That’s interesting because I thought the second one was dangerous because of the “X” in the name. I’ve always associated X with bad or harmful things. But this is probably due to some childhood thing I’ve purged from memory.
But of course my true weakness is vocabulary, I googled both words before I read on.
February 10th, 2009at 1:01 am(#)
This gets me thinking about the names of the runs at my local ski area:
St. Bernhard
Debbie’s Gold
Meister
Dom
Eisfallen
Fuessen
Rollen
Schlucht
Adrenaline
International
Edelweis Bowl
. . .
I never noticed how much even in an environment I know well, with runs in a language (German) I speak proficiently, the more ‘foreign’ sounding words always seem like the most challenging runs. They’re not!
It also gets me thinking about my own work developing products and writing material–can I make truly radical concepts (for most folks) easily accessible? Can I make them feel safe? How do I most powerfully create a linguistic environment which supports risk-taking?
February 10th, 2009at 8:23 am(#)
The only word that stood out to this 30 something was Killicide; screw the rest. Plus the information delivered here to the example is incorrect.
February 10th, 2009at 9:35 am(#)
@Paul – Yes I thinks so. As I say in the last part of the article it probably extends to everything from diagrams to buildings that “seem” familiar or unfamiliar, whether we’ve ever seen them before or not.
@Weak – You raise a good observation. The study didn’t find that 100% of people find the first one more dangerous, just a larger proportion of people. You’re experience is an excellent example of why it’s not 100% – everyone’s background is different. I would also add that this study wouldn’t work in it’s current form if it was conducted in another language. The effect they are trying to measure is fluency – or “perceived” ease of fluency. See Barak’s comment.
@Barak – Thanks for the nice example of the “fluency = familiarity” effect in a language other than English.
@Brian – Yes the “killicide” is a fanciful invention of mine (though google reveals it’s been poping up for years too!). The entire ingredients list is not real, including the HFCS. Did you notice the 5-Hydroxy-poisonate and the Methyl-dioxy-confusion as well?
I’m not sure what example you think is incorrect. However, the essence of good science is that it MUST be subject to debate, so I would invite you back to the comments to please expand your thoughts.
This process of proposing of ideas and then public review is the way the best and most correct theories become cornerstones of the world’s scientific knowledge.
In a way, the scientific community has been crowd sourcing for centuries.
Cheers
Patrick
February 10th, 2009at 11:36 pm(#)
This is a very interesting subject. I’ve always asked people to write as simple as possible. The point of writing is to the message across.
Yet for some reason, people like to use big, fancy words. Especially when they are trying to come up with the name of their new brand.
February 11th, 2009at 5:40 pm(#)
Whenever I saw the words I thought, “How the heck should I know?” Great article, as always. Not what I expected. I thought the post was really going to tell me about something that was about to kill me from it’s place in the cupboard.
February 14th, 2009at 5:07 pm(#)
Great article.
This explains why Gewurztraminer, one of the yummiest wine varietals on earth, has never enjoyed runaway popularity.
Speaking of which, back when wine drinking was starting to catch on in North America, Robert Mondavi noticed that people were unsure how to pronounce Sauvignon Blanc so they didn’t buy it. In a stroke of marketing genius, he took the Fume from Pouilly-Fume and renamed his Sauvignon Blanc “Fume Blanc.” Suddenly it rocketed in popularity.
February 14th, 2009at 5:34 pm(#)
As someone allergic to corn, and accustomed to scanning lists of ingredients every day, the words that jumped out to me were “corn syrup.” After I read that, I looked at the other words and concluded they were fake, and not dangerous at all.
February 15th, 2009at 1:40 am(#)
Awesome, wonderful, educational, not the type you get from school, thought provoking.
Thank You
February 15th, 2009at 3:50 am(#)
very nice.this is very useful for me.ecellent
February 15th, 2009at 6:45 am(#)
> We tend to be more distrustful of people
> who’s names we can’t pronounce that easily.
And I tend to be more distrustful of people whose grammar is awry.
Incidentally I thought that both chemicals were clearly made up hence totally sideways on the 1-7 scale.
February 15th, 2009at 2:12 pm(#)
Responding to Patrick’s response to @Weak about the study not working in its current form if conducted in a different language:
At one point, psychologists and sociologists discovered that their golden rule tell-all the IQ test was, in fact, was significantly framed by the middle to upper class WASP from which it was produced. Many indicators of low IQ had much more to do with cultural unfamiliarity than with actual limited intelligence.
February 16th, 2009at 4:21 am(#)
@patrick: Apart from the chicken killicide, the bit that made me laugh most was the idea of “poping up”.
> Yes the “killicide” is a fanciful invention of mine (though google
> reveals it’s been poping up for years too!)
February 16th, 2009at 11:47 am(#)
In other words, familiarity breeds contempt.
February 26th, 2009at 4:13 am(#)
I’ve actually never thought about this in that way. I actually did think hnegripitrom sounded more dangerous, just because it’s more difficult to pronounce.
Like, my family always uses Tylenol whenever one of us is feeling sick. But if they were to tell me to take acetaminophen, I would automatically assume it was a dangerous thing to take and would refuse, even though it would help me get better.
I kind of like how that works.
February 28th, 2009at 3:42 am(#)
Spending a week pondering a laundry detergent has its good side. If each person spent time thinking about the materials in their ordinary items, where they came from, how safe they are, what organic alternatives there are.. you get the picture… we would have a more informed and smarter consumer and probably more corporate responsibility — of necessity to their profits.
This test, as with so many others, seems to also be about something else, e.g.: trust. We are told that one term is more dangerous than the other, so one has to choose something-what if each were equally dangerous/innocuous? In fact they are both dangerous because they take advantage of people trusting that statements from “researchers” have validity on the face of it. Why not use actual chemical names-there is no lack of them-then see which one is more dangerous in perception and if that corresponds to fact. That seems to me a more significant test.