Name-letter effect
Discovered in 1985 by the Belgian psychologist Jozef Nuttin, the name-letter effect has been replicated in dozens of studies, involving subjects from over 15 countries, using four different alphabets.
An analysis of a large database of charity donations revealed that a disproportionately large number of people donate to disaster relief following hurricanes with names sharing their initial letter (e.g. Kate and Kevin following Hurricane Katrina).
Studies that investigate the impact of name-letter matching on bigger life decisions (where to live, whom to marry, which occupation to take on) are controversial.
[1] In an extension of the studies, subjects were asked to rank the English alphabet by the pleasantness of the appearance of capital letters.
[7][8] In his lab at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Nuttin designed experiments to test the hypothesis that people place a higher value on letters that feature in their name.
[8] To find an effect which ruled out mere exposure, Nuttin created a yoked control design in which two subjects evaluated the same letters separately.
The shading in the table reveals the pattern hidden to subjects, who would have been told to circle their preferred letter of each pair as fast as possible without thinking.
Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Greek (the only one with a non-Roman alphabet), Hungarian, Italian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, and Spanish.
Cars in Austria and Hungary have a sticker displaying their nationality with a capital letter that does not match the country's name in the local language (A and H respectively).
Forer, in 1940, and Alluisi and Adams, in 1962, found a positive correlation between the frequency of occurrence of letters and phonemes and how attractive they were judged to be.
Despite being given a monetary reward and unlimited time, none of the subjects of his original study were able to find a pattern in the stimulus lists, ruling out the possibility that they knew their own name-letters were there.
[60] Results of a study with 100 Bulgarian subjects who at a later age learned English, German, French or Spanish revealed a name-letter effect for the Roman alphabet as well as for Cyrillic.
[63] In a follow-up study Hoorens, Nuttin, Herman and Pavakanun tested the strength of the name-letter effect among elementary-school children, in a cross-sectional experimental design involving Flemish and Hungarian second, fourth, and sixth graders.
Instead of finding the name-effect to decrease with age as might be expected, they found it increased, thus proving that mastery pleasure is not the principal cause.
[K] They found that the time at which students had learned the second alphabet made no difference in the strength of the name-letter effect, thereby ruling out mastery pleasure as a co-determinant.
Beginning with Greenwald and Banaji in 1995, this group states that the name-letter effect results from implicit self-esteem, a person's tendency to evaluate him or herself positively in a spontaneous, automatic, or unconscious manner.
[76] As early as 1926 Syz discovered that a person's own name is special compared to others, eliciting physical responses measurable on the skin.
These positive feelings induce subjects to unknowingly select the letters of their own name, producing the name-letter effect.
[74] Because by definition implicit self-esteem is not accessible to introspection, measures of it do not rely on direct self-reports but on the degree to which objects associated with the self generate positive versus negative thoughts.
[97] They suggest it may be useful to use not just initials but all name letters for measuring implicit self-esteem, something which Hoorens says is her most important recommendation.
[97][98] The Letter Preference Task has been used to measure implicit self-esteem in contexts as diverse as depression, physical health, social acceptance, unrealistic optimism, feedback sensitivity, self-regulation, and defensiveness.
In controlled studies in the lab, Hodson and Olson tried to find evidence of people liking everyday things (e.g. foods, animals) that matched their name initials.
[100] The researchers did discover a small but reliable effect of initials on brand-name preferences within individuals (e.g. Hank did like Honda more than non-matching brands).
[112][L] Dyjas, Grasman, Wetzels, van der Maas, and Wagenmakers criticized the method Pelham et al. used in their analysis of archives of deaths in 23 "Saint cities" in the US, such as St. Louis and St. Paul.
[119][120] Simonsohn also raised the possibility of reverse causality in the case of Anseel and Duyck's analysis of a large data set consisting of Belgians' last names and the companies they work for.
When he controlled for reverse causality in a large US data set, he could not see any evidence for people choosing to work for companies matching their initial.
However, McCullough and Williams found no evidence of a name-letter effect for the letter 'K' in baseball players striking out (shown on the scoreboard with a 'K'), despite an earlier study by Nelson and Simmons suggesting there was.
[125] In response to Simonsohn's critical analyses of their earlier methods, Pelham and Carvallo published a new study in 2015, describing how they now controlled for gender, ethnicity, and education confounds.
In one study they looked at census data and concluded that men disproportionately worked in eleven occupations that matched their surnames, for example, Baker, Carpenter, and Farmer, something the New Scientist has coined nominative determinism.
[108][126] Voracek, Rieder, Stieger, and Swami investigated which way the arrow of causality points when it comes to names influencing choice of occupation.
