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Is your name easy to pronounce? You will like others more

Is your name easy to pronounce? You will like others more

March 19, 2024

We have all heard many times saying that people can not be judged by their appearance, that the important thing is inside and that to be able to value people you have to know them well to them and their life stories.

However, from what has been seen from multiple findings in psychology, we now know that these phrases respond more to the wishes of some people than to reality. Humans we are specialists in using the minimum amount of information to judge the people with whom we interact .

Simple names, more sexies?

Normally, this means that we value people for their appearance or for what they do during the first hours we know them, but research indicates that our propensity for superficiality could go even beyond this.


Specifically, it has provided evidence that reinforces the idea that part of these unconscious efforts dedicated to valuing others focus on ... the name of this .

Much power concentrated in few letters

If there is something more superficial and impersonal than someone's physical appearance, it is the name that turns out to be that particular person. However, it seems that in the world of relationships mental shortcuts prevail largely over rational analysis. Or at least that is what this research by researchers in social psychology and published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology indicates.

The conclusion is that the simpler and easier to pronounce is the name of a person, the greater the chances that our treatment of them will be more favorable .


Why is this happening?

The proposed explanation is that the human brain It is designed to promote that it is positively valued what is related to a simple type of information and easy to process. This hypothesis, which is based on the existence of many other investigations carried out previously, emphasizes the way in which our nervous system selects information with less chance of wasting our time.

Of course, the time we would waste trying to process the name of a person with a name difficult to pronounce will almost always seem a trifle, but it is not so much if we consider the number of names with which we touch throughout our lives , or the millions of years of evolution that have been transforming our brain into a machine to optimize the way we manage time and avoid dedicating our efforts to tasks that are not going to offer us a reward. In this sense, people with a complicated name start with a disadvantage .


What was the investigation?

The research is based on the performance of several similar studies. In the first, simply a series of volunteers were asked to rate several names according to their difficulty in pronunciation and according to the degree to which they liked . In the second they were asked to vote in imaginary elections in which they could only know the names of the candidates, and in the third they had to choose who to vote among a series of politicians whose names and surnames they already knew.

The ease with which our name is pronounced correlates with success in life

In another study, instead of relying only on hypothetical situations, the researchers decided to contrast their results with tests in the field, beyond the laboratory environment. For this they selected the names of several real lawyers. These names were scored by the volunteers according to the ease of pronunciation and the degree in which they liked. The most interesting thing was that when comparing the scores in the difficulty dimension of pronunciation of the name with the average salaries, the degrees of responsibility and in general the degree of prestige at professional level, a correlation was found. That is to say, that the name indicated a part of the professional success of these real people .

In addition, in these studies it was found that the difficulty of pronouncing these names, rather than their length or the possibilities of being foreigners, determined the way in which these people were valued. In particular, the ease or difficulty of pronunciation allowed predicting by 40% the degree to which they like or not these individuals.


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