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The name-pronunciation effect: Why people like Mr. Smith more than Mr. Colquhoun

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jesp.2011.12.002 Get rights and content

Abstract

Names are rich sources of information. They can signal gender, ethnicity, or class; they may connote personality characteristics ranging from warmth and cheerfulness to morality. But names also differ in a much more fundamental way: some are simply easier to pronounce than others. Five studies provide evidence for the name-pronunciation effect: easy-to-pronounce names (and their bearers) are judged more positively than difficult-to-pronounce names. Studies 1–3 demonstrate that people form more positive impressions of easy-to-pronounce names than of difficult-to-pronounce names. Study 4 finds this effect generalizable to ingroup targets. Study 5 highlights an important real-world implication of the name-pronunciation effect: people with easier-to-pronounce surnames occupy higher status positions in law firms. These effects obtain independent of name length, unusualness, typicality, foreignness, and orthographic regularity. This work demonstrates the potency of processing fluency in the information rich context of impression formation.

Highlights

► Article considers the name pronunciation effect. ► The easier a name is to pronounce the more positively it is judged. ► This holds for name evaluation, voting preferences, and occupational status.

Introduction

Names carry a lot of information. They can be diagnostic of social categories such as race, ethnicity, gender, and class (Kasof, 1993); they can influence impression formation on a range of attributes including success, warmth, morality, popularity, cheerfulness, and masculinity–femininity (e.g., Mehrabian, 2001, Mehrabian and Piercy, 1993). Importantly, such name connotations matter: first name characteristics predict income and educational attainment (Aura & Hess, 2004); a person with an African American-sounding name is less likely to get a call-back for a job interview than a person with a White-sounding name (Bertrand & Mullainathan, 2004); boys with girls' names are more likely to be suspended from school (Figlio, 2007); and name popularity is negatively associated with juvenile delinquency (Kalist & Lee, 2009).

Such effects are typically explained by the fact that names activate a reservoir of semantic information, which then informs judgment. Etaugh, Bridges, Cummings-Hill, and Cohen (1999), for example, found that women who take their husband's surname are judged to be less agentic and more communal than those who retain their own names. A name activates a rich set of semantic information – from connotations of the bearer's age, to intellectual competence, race, ethnicity, social class (Kasof, 1993) – which impacts impression formation and evaluation.

We argue, however, that there is a more basic route from name to evaluation; a route that has been neglected in the study of impression formation. Names vary in the ease with which they are pronounced. Drawing on work in processing fluency, the current paper explored the name-pronunciation effect: that easy-to-pronounce names (and the bearers of those names) are judged more positively than difficult-to-pronounce names.

This prediction stems from research on processing fluency –— the subjective experience of ease or difficulty associated with a cognitive process (see Alter & Oppenheimer, 2009 for a review). According to the hedonic marking hypothesis, processing fluency automatically elicits a positive affective state which is attributed to the stimulus under judgment (Winkielman, Schwarz, Fazendeiro, & Reber, 2003). As a consequence, easy-to-process stimuli – be they Chinese ideographs, pictures of furniture, or collections of dots – are evaluated more positively than difficult-to-process stimuli (see Schwarz, 2004, Winkielman et al., 2003, for reviews).

One relatively understudied instance of processing fluency is phonological fluency, which is a function of how easy it is to pronounce a word (Alter & Oppenheimer, 2009). Some research shows that phonologically fluent stocks are expected to perform better (Alter & Oppenheimer, 2006), that easy-to-pronounce words are defined more concretely than difficult-to-pronounce words (Alter & Oppenheimer, 2008), and that drugs with easy-to-read names are deemed less risky (Song & Schwarz, 2009). No work, however, has considered the consequences of name pronunciation for impression formation. Drawing on the hedonic marking hypothesis, we hypothesized a name-pronunciation effect: that easy-to-pronounce names (and their bearers) will be judged more positively than difficult-to-pronounce names.

Although it may seem a straightforward extrapolation from the hedonic marking hypothesis, it is not apparent that name pronunciation ease will influence impression formation. Because we often make judgments about others in information-rich environments (in which ample information besides name fluency may be available), pronunciation ease may contribute little. Indeed, Winkielman et al., 2003, Reber et al., 2004 have speculated that processing fluency may exert limited influence when people have access to other information relevant to judgment. Given the diversity of information that people's names carry, as well as the variety of other information sources often available, it is not obvious that pronunciation experiences will have any impact on impression formation. Thus, across five studies we investigated the name-pronunciation effect and its consequences in a range of contexts, from relatively information-poor through to information-rich laboratory conditions, as well as in the real-world context of law firm hierarchies.

Section snippets

Study 1

In Study 1, we sought to demonstrate the name-pronunciation effect by showing that names that are easy to pronounce are liked more than names that are difficult to pronounce. We controlled for name unusualness, as unusual names are often perceived as less desirable (Busse and Seraydarian, 1978, Mehrabian, 1992, West and Shults, 1976) and may, on average, be more difficult-to-pronounce. We also controlled for word length and orthographic regularity. Orthographic regularity (operationalized as

Study 2

Having established the name-pronunciation effect in tightly controlled but rather impoverished conditions, in Study 2 we tested whether the effect would obtain in a more meaningful context: voting behavior. Thus, in Study 2, we considered whether name pronunciation ease would influence voting preferences for candidates in a mock ballot. Importantly, this study also used a different sample (Anglo-Australians) and three different name-nationalities in order to generalize across participant

Study 3

In Study 2, although the ballot format provided a contextual frame for name evaluation, namely voting, it still utilized name characteristics as the only source of information upon which judgments could be based. In Study 3 we tested the robustness of the name-pronunciation effect in a richer context, by embedding target names in mock-newspaper articles containing ample decision-relevant information about election candidates.

Study 4

Studies 1–3 examined the name-pronunciation effect for outgroup names. However, it is not clear whether this effect is restricted to outgroup targets. Given that people typically have more information about ingroups than outgroups (Linville et al., 1989, Park and Rothbart, 1982, Quattrone, 1986), and that they may be more motivated to consider all judgment-relevant content when making ingroup judgments (Allport, 1954, Linville et al., 1989), it is possible that fluency effects may be weaker for

Study 5

Studies 1–4 demonstrated the name-pronunciation effect in a range of laboratory settings. In Study 5 we examined the relationship between pronunciation fluency and evaluation in a naturalistic environment. Some work on name characteristics and political judgments (e.g., O'Sullivan, Chen, Mohapatra, Sigelman, & Lewis, 1988) shows that subtle name effects may actually disappear in contexts in which other relevant information is available (e.g., political party affiliation). We thus thought it

General discussion

Five studies demonstrated the name-pronunciation effect: easy-to-pronounce names (and the people who bear them) are evaluated more positively than difficult-to-pronounce names. This effect obtained across various samples (Australian and Asian), various outgroups, as well as for ingroup targets, various analysis strategies (item vs. participant as unit of analysis) and in contexts ranging from rather impoverished name ratings to more contextualized political judgments and even status in the

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