If It’s Difficult to Pronounce, It Must Be Risky.

ABSTRACT- Low processing fluency fosters the impression that a stimulus is unfamiliar, which in turn results in perceptions of higher risk, independent of whether the risk is desirable or undesirable. In Studies 1 and 2, ostensible food additives were rated as more harmful when their names were difficult to pronounce than when their names were easy to pronounce; mediation analyses indicated that this effect was mediated by the perceived novelty of the substance. In Study 3, amusement-park rides were rated as more likely to make one sick (an undesirable risk) and also as more exciting and adventurous (a desirable risk) when their names were difficult to pronounce than when their names were easy to pronounce.

I assume this is a correlation to “the risk of the unknown is often overestimated” in that difficult-to-pronounce is deemed “more unknown” than something that’s easy to pronounce.

via Schneier

And some interesting comments there — would you rather drink water distilled from urine or taken from a mountain stream?