Between Letters, Names, and Me

Take a moment to think about the letters that make up your name. Which are consonants, and which are vowels? Do you have a favorite letter, and is it in your name? Is it your initial? Are people named Taylor more likely to give a TED Talk? Is someone named Elaine more likely to become an Educational Psychologist? Are people named Goose more likely to need glasses, or perhaps work in the vision industry? Do relationships between people who share a first initial last longer on average than those that don’t? I don’t have direct answers to any of these yet, but a psychological phenomenon known as the name-letter effect may help explain them.

Research Helps Answer Questions Like Theses

In 1985, Nuttin published a paper titled “Narcissism beyond Gestalt and awareness: the name letter effect,” which established that people prefer the letters that appear in their names over other letters in the alphabet. The results have been reproduced in fifteen countries, four alphabets, and across age ranges and genders. People who change their name usually prefer both sets of letters, with initial letters holding the strongest preference. This preference is claimed to be unconscious, which has become a focal point for later research attempting to challenge that claim.

Areas I hope to see future research in include: for people who have used the same nickname or screen name for a long time, how does it affect their letter preferences? For transgender people who have changed their name, how does the NLE show up for them, and does it differ depending on whether the first initial changed?

The name-letter effect, while imperfect and the source of a mountain of new questions, created a steppingstone and the scientific basis for answering questions about identity, language, preference, and unconscious decision-making.

When It’s About You

Implicit egotism, the automatic unconscious preference to associate with things resembling ourselves, is still an active research area. Pelham, Mirenberg, and Jones (2002) found that people are slightly more likely to live in places whose name resembles their own, or to choose careers whose name resembles their own (think Laura the Lawyer), and they’re even more likely to marry someone whose first or last name resembles their own. The same authors report a birthday-number effect, where people have a slight preference for living in cities that match their birthday numbers.

For example, I was born on June 29th, so my birthday numbers are six and twenty-nine, or broken down, two and nine. That would mean I’m more likely to buy a house on a hypothetical 29th Street. Admittedly the numbers in my birthday are big enough that the example feels contrived.

Some of the findings in this line of research don’t pass a basic sniff test, and honestly, they sound like pseudoscience. Are there really more people in Georgia named Georgia because of an implicit bias linking their name to their life choices, or did their parents pick the name at birth and they simply never left the state? Other researchers have pushed back. Gelman (2009) found that any actual effect the letters in your name have on your career is quite small: out of roughly 620,000 people named Dennis, only 482 are dentists.

As with most things, it depends. I searched the North Carolina State Bar directory and found 37 active Lauras practicing in Raleigh. That’s roughly 2-3x the ~10-15 you’d expect from a Fermi estimate (Raleigh has ~480,000 people, ~0.5% of US females are named Laura, and ~1% of adults are lawyers), though cohort effects probably explain most of the gap.

So I searched other five-letter names of similar popularity to Laura: five lawyers named Riley, seven named Carol, six named Grace, and thirteen named Taylor. I wanted more data, so I kept going, this time looking at other L-names. I found twenty-two lawyers named Lisa and another twenty-two named Lauren.

The numbers do seem to suggest that, at least when searching Raleigh, North Carolina for lawyers, there tend to be more of them sharing a name when that name starts with L. If you pick another licensed profession with an online directory and stick to the same general area (Raleigh or Wake County), the tendency should be reproducible.

It’s a small but observable effect. I wouldn’t say anyone’s future is set in stone because of their name. When you read research like this, pause and ask whether it’s actually true, consider how the sample might have shaped the results, and then run your own comparisons against public data to confirm what you’re seeing is accurate and proportionate, rather than fuel for confirmation bias.

When It’s About the Group

The town you live in, where you work, the university you study at, or the career you pursue are things you can directly influence and try to change if you want to. But sometimes we end up in groups of people we don’t control, whether that be our customers, co-workers, or who we report to. Does sharing initials (at least upon learning their names) affect the results of these interactions?

Researchers Polman, Pollmann, and Poehlman (2013) tested the name-letter effect’s role in group relationships. They predicted that when two or more people in a group share initials, this would create a slight bond between them and even spread the positive affect to members of the group who did not share initials. To test their hypothesis, they studied undergraduate university students. They performed a field study and a lab study, which helps establish validity and helps them understand whether the results are generalizable.

The first study was a field test determining whether groups of three to five undergrad students working on a semester-long project worth 40% of their grade would work better together if two or more of the students shared initials. Group members rated the group fit, and the final project’s grade was the judge of performance. Notably, the instructor participating in the study did not know the hypothesis of the researchers. The study found that when two or more of the group members shared initials, grade performance improved.

The second study was in a controlled lab environment. Groups of undergraduate students were tasked with solving a murder mystery and were given hints at random. 70% of groups with members who shared initials solved the mystery correctly, whereas only 41% of groups with members who did not share initials were able to solve the mystery.

The takeaway is that group outcomes improve when two or more group members share initials. The researchers emphasized that the effect seems to affect group members who are not among those who share initials. The groups were assessed as a whole, and individual contributions were not measured as part of the study. In other words, in a group of Emma, Emily, and Riley, the group scores a 95% but Riley’s contributions were relatively minor; Riley would still be considered to have benefited from the name-letter effect. This contagion effect is the part of the research I think deserves more attention from the academic community, and with a less convenient sample.

Conclusion

It’s been over 40 years since the publication of Nuttin’s research paper on the name-letter effect (NLE), and I hope to see the work continue over the next 40 years as we keep learning about how it operates. How conscious the decisions are is an important detail to figure out.

There’s data that suggests the actual effect size is small. But the effect is there. I searched public records to find my own Laura the Lawyer, and the numbers alone say a lot.

Group dynamics can be used to create better teams in the workforce, but without measurements of individual contributions, it’s hard to know who is benefiting from a group effect and who is being silently excluded. As research in this area continues, I recommend everyone double-check their assumptions, run their own experiments where possible, and ask yourself: what is the data really saying?

The Honking Goose