[4] Raymond Smeets theorised that if implicit egotism stems from a positive evaluation of the self, then people with low self-esteem would not gravitate towards choices associated with the self, but possibly away from them (a laboratory experiment was cited in support of this hypothesis).
He criticized Pelham and his colleagues for not considering confounding factors in their data analyses, and pointed out that reverse causality could also help explain several of the correlations.
In three studies -- looking at both 1880 and 1940 U.S. Census data as well as 1911 English Census data -- they found consistent evidence of people disproportionately working in eleven occupations whose titles matched their surnames (namely, baker, barber, butcher, butler, carpenter, farmer, foreman, mason, miner, painter, and porter).
Pelham and Carvallo argued that "natural experiments" such as this may attenuate confounders that Simonsohn claimed were potentially applicable to past studies of implicit egotism.
They suggest that a tendency to develop strong preferences for things that resemble the self may be explained by well-established psychological processes such as mere exposure and classical conditioning.