Dangerous Words

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.

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