Though it might seem impossible, and certainly inadvisable, to judge a person by their name, a new study suggests our brains try anyway.
The more pronounceable a person's name is, the more likely people are to favor them.
"When we can process a piece of information more easily, when it's easier to comprehend, we come to like it more," said psychologist Adam Alter of New York University and co-author of a Journal of Experimental Social Psychology study published in December.
Fluency, the idea that the brain favors information that's easy to use, dates back to the 1960s, when researchers found that people most liked images of Chinese characters if they'd seen them many times before.
Researchers since then have explored other roles that names play, how they affect our judgment and to what degree.
Studies have shown, for example, that people can partly predict a person's income and education using only their first name. Childhood is perhaps the richest area for name research: Boys with girls' names are more likely to be suspended from school. And the less popular a name is, the more likely a child is to be delinquent.
In 2005, Alter and his colleagues explored how pronounceability of company names affects their performance in the stock market. Stripped of all obvious influences, they found companies with simpler names and ticker symbols traded better than the stocks of more difficult-to-pronounce companies.
"The effect is often very, very hard to quantify because so much depends on context, but it's there and measurable," Alter said. "You can't avoid it."
But how much does pronunciation guide our perceptions of people? To find out, Alter and colleagues Simon Laham and Peter Koval of the University of Melbourne carried out five studies.
All in a Name
The ease of pronouncing a name, or its fluency, can in part predict a person's likability. Below is a sample of 10 names of volunteers from least fluent (hardest to pronounce) to most fluent (easiest to pronounce). 1. Leszczynska
2. Vougiouklakis
3. Colquhoun
4. Loughnane
5. Mathieson
6. MacDonaugh
7. Kupka
8. Jarvis
9. Matson
10. Sherman
In the first, they asked 19 female and 16 male college students to rank 50 surnames according to their ease or difficulty of pronunciation, and according to how much they liked or disliked them. In the second, they had 17 females and 7 male students vote for hypothetical political candidates solely on the basis of their names. In the third, they asked 55 female and 19 male students to vote on candidates about whom they knew both names and some political positions.
Altogether the researchers found that a name's pronounceability, regardless of length or seeming foreignness, mattered most in determining likability. Ease of pronunciation accounted for about 40 percent of off-the-cuff likability.
"These settings were pretty impoverished, of course. In the real world, so many other things are going on that play a role," Alter said.
In the latter studies, Alter's team wanted to get a better sense of name-pronunciation effects outside the lab. They collected the names of 500 randomly selected lawyers, which undergraduates then rated for pronounceability and likability. When the researchers compared their tastes against the lawyers' academic pedigrees, average salaries and corporate positions, they found a small but noticeable correlation.
With other variables eliminated, about 1.5 percent of a lawyer's success -- at least in this study -- seemed to rest on the pronounceability of his or her name.
"Obviously that's a lot smaller than 40 percent, and we don't know which lawyer is most competent, which is clearly going to matter the most," Alter said. "But the name still matters."
Alter has already been influenced by his own work. If and when he has children, he said, he plans to keep their names simple.
*Image: Dave Mosher/Wired
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Citation: "The name-pronunciation effect: Why people like Mr. Smith more than Mr. Colquhoun." By Simon M. Lahama, Peter Kovala and Adam L. Alter. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, published online Dec. 9, 2011. DOI: 10.1016/j.jesp.2011.12.002
