Processing fluency is used as a basis for various types of judgment. For example, previous research has shown that people judge food additives with names that are more difficult to pronounce (i.e., that are disfluent) to be more harmful. We explored the possibility that the association between disfluency and perceived harmfulness might be in the opposite direction for some categories of stimuli. Although we found some support for this hypothesis, an improved analysis and further studies indicated that the effect was strongly dependent on the stimuli used. We then used stimulus sampling and showed that the original association between fluency and perceived safety was not replicable with the newly constructed stimuli. We found the association between fluency and perceived safety using the newly constructed stimuli in a final study, but only when pronounceability was confounded with word length. The results cast doubt on generalizability of the association between pronounceability and perceived safety and underscore the importance of treating stimulus as a random factor.

Department of Management Faculty of Business Administration University of Economics Prague 2 Department of Psychology Faculty of Human Sciences University of Würzburg

Department of Psychology Faculty of Arts Charles University 4 Department of Marketing Communication and Public Relations Faculty of Social Sciences Charles University

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