Friday, November 16, 2007

What's in a name?

A professor from my program was involved with this research - Pretty tantalizing stuff, though not a drop-dead connection. Still, I can't complain about being a B-rent, A-pplegate!

Psychologists in marketing at Yale and the University of California, San Diego studying the unconscious influence of names say a preference for our own names and initials — the "name-letter effect" — can have some negative consequences.
Students whose names begin with C or D get lower grades than those whose names begin with A or B; major league baseball players whose first or last names began with K (the strikeout-signifying letter) are significantly more likely to strike out, according to the report published in the December issue of Psychological Science.


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1 comment:

Micah said...

this name stuff is very interesting though i don't know what to make of it. if you read dubner and levitt's freakonomics you'll see that these guys are interested in aptonyms and all sorts of naming consequences. they write about brothers loser and lucky (real names). turns out lou (that's what his friends called him) was a highly decorated police officer and lucky was a highly convicted criminal.