Is Your Name Easy To Pronounce? Others Will Like You More
We have all heard it said many times that you cannot judge people by their appearance, that what is important is inside and that in order 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, today we know that these phrases respond more to the desires of some people than to reality. Humans We are specialists in using the minimum amount of information to judge the people we interact with
Typically, this means we value people by how they look or what they do within the first few hours we meet them, but research indicates that our propensity for superficiality may go even deeper than this.
Specifically, it has provided evidence that reinforces the idea that a part of these unconscious efforts dedicated to valuing others are focused on… the name of this
A lot of power concentrated in a few letters
If there is something more superficial and impersonal than someone’s physical appearance, it is the name that specific someone happens to have. However, it seems that in the world of relationships, mental shortcuts largely take precedence over rational analysis. Or at least that is what this research carried out 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 a person’s name is, 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 the positive appreciation of 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 the information that is least likely to waste our time.
Of course, the time we would waste trying to process the name of a person with a name that is difficult to pronounce will almost always seem trivial, but it is not so trivial if we take into account the number of names we come across throughout our lives. , or the millions of years of evolution that have transformed our brain into a machine that optimizes the way we manage time and avoid dedicating our efforts to tasks that will not offer us a reward. In this sense, people with a complicated name are at a disadvantage
What did the research consist of?
The research is based on several similar studies. In the first, simply A series of volunteers were asked to rate various names according to their difficulty in pronunciation and the degree to which they liked them 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 for 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. To do this, they selected the names of several real lawyers. These names were rated by volunteers based on ease of pronunciation and the degree to which they liked them. The most interesting thing was that when comparing the scores in the dimension of difficulty in pronouncing the name with the average salaries, degrees of responsibility and in general the degree of prestige at a professional level, a correlation was found. That is to say, that the name indicated a part of the professional success of these real people
Furthermore, these studies found that the difficulty of pronouncing these names, rather than their length or the possibility that they were foreign, determined the way in which these people were valued. Specifically, the ease or difficulty of pronunciation made it possible to predict by 40% the degree to which these individuals liked or disliked it.
