Name-letter effect
The name-letter effect is the tendency of people to prefer the letters in their name over other letters in the alphabet. Whether subjects are asked to rank all letters of the alphabet, rate each of the letters, choose the letter they prefer out of a set of two, or pick a small set of letters they most prefer, on average people consistently like the letters in their own name the most. Crucially, subjects are not aware that they are choosing letters from their name.
Discovered in 1985 by the Belgian psychologist Jozef Nuttin, the name-letter effect has been replicated in dozens of studies, involving subjects from over 15 countries, using four different alphabets. It holds across age and gender. People who changed their names many years ago tend to prefer the letters of both their current and original names over non-name letters. The effect is most prominent for initials, but even when initials are excluded, the remaining letters of both given and family names still tend to be preferred over non-name letters.
Most people like themselves; the name is associated with the self, and hence the letters of the name are preferred, despite the fact that they appear in many other words. People who do not like themselves tend not to exhibit the name-letter effect. A similar effect has been found for numbers related to birthdays: people tend to prefer the number signifying the day of the month on which they were born. Alternative explanations for the name-letter effect, such as frequent exposure and early mastery, have been ruled out. In psychological assessments, the Name Letter Preference Task is widely used to estimate implicit self-esteem.
There is some evidence that the effect has implications for real-life decisions. In the lab, people disproportionately favor brands matching their initials. An analysis of a large database of charity donations revealed that a disproportionately large number of people donate to disaster relief following hurricanes with names sharing their initial letter. Studies that investigate the impact of name-letter matching on bigger life decisions are controversial.
Background
Systematic interest in the letter preference began in 1959 with brand-preference studies by researchers Mecherikoff and Horton. These tried to find the relative appeal of letters for use in package labels. In an extension of the studies, subjects were asked to rank the English alphabet by the pleasantness of the appearance of capital letters. While there was not a great deal of agreement amongst the subjects, a strong positive correlation was found between a letter's average rank and how frequently it occurred as an initial letter of family names.Robert Zajonc, a social psychologist, published research in 1968 into preferences between pairs of words : in the overwhelming majority of trials the preferred word was also the most common. Zajonc also tested preferences for nonsense words and found that people liked them the more they heard them. He interpreted these results as evidence that mere repeated exposure to a stimulus is sufficient to enhance its attractiveness.
Around 1977, Belgian experimental psychologist Jozef Nuttin was driving on a highway looking at license plates when he noticed that he preferred plates containing letters from his own name. He wondered if people in general would prefer stimuli that are somehow connected to them; a "mere belongingness" as opposed to Zajonc's mere exposure.
First study
In his lab at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Nuttin designed experiments to test the hypothesis that people place a higher value on letters that feature in their name. It was crucial to the experimental design to rule out other factors, particularly mere exposure. If letters in a name are also letters that occur with higher frequency, then a preference for one's own letters might arise from the mere-exposure effect.Method
To find an effect which ruled out mere exposure, Nuttin created a yoked control design in which two subjects evaluated the same letters separately. Some of the letters belonged to one subject's name, and some of the letters belonged to the other subject's name, while some were random. In this design, any difference in preference between subjects would have to be based on whether the letter occurred in their name.For example, take the fictitious pair Irma Maes and Jef Jacobs as shown in the table. The first stimulus is A and U: the last letter of Irma's first name and a letter not in her name. The next stimulus is M and D: the penultimate letter from Irma's first name and a letter not part of her name. As can be seen in the table this is repeated for the remaining letters of Irma's first name. The letters of her last name then also appear in reverse order, and finally the letters of both of Jef's names. The shading in the table reveals the pattern hidden to subjects, who would have been told to circle their preferred letter of each pair as fast as possible without thinking.
In the first trial, 38 Dutch-speaking local elementary school girls circled the letters they preferred in two yoked lists of letter pairs. A significant preference for the letters of one's own name over those of the other person was found. The second experiment used 98 Dutch-speaking local university students, to see if more years of reading made a difference. Four other factors were varied: either pairs or triads of letters; encircling the preferred letter or crossing out the less preferred ones; the letters QXYZ, infrequent in Dutch, included or excluded; own-name letters presented first or last. All conditions gave a name-letter effect, with a stronger effect when QXYZ were included and the less preferred letter was crossed out. No significant difference was found using family name rather than first name or both names. While the effect was strongest for initials, subsequent data analysis revealed a significant effect even without the first and last initials.
Discussion
Nuttin concluded that the experiments showed that, independent of visual, acoustical, aesthetic, semantic, and frequency characteristics, letters belonging to one's own first and family names are preferred above other letters. He framed the effect in the context of narcissism, Gestalt theory and awareness, as reflected in the title of his 1985 article "Narcissism beyond Gestalt and awareness: the name letter effect", in which "beyond Gestalt" refers to the fact that subjects were not shown names, only letters in isolation, and "beyond awareness" to the fact that subjects did not realize that the letters of their own names were used. Nuttin claimed the effect he found was the first to go beyond Gestalt and awareness.Second study
In 1987 Nuttin published his second study, describing experiments done in 1984 and 1985 with the help of Hilde Sas. Because of the far-reaching implications of the name-letter effect for psychological theories, Nuttin found it wise to first test the effect's generality and robustness, before setting off on a research program aimed at understanding the underlying affective and cognitive processes at work. He wondered whether the effect would be found in all cultural and linguistic communities, or whether the first study revealed an effect due to some unknown idiosyncratic aspect of the Dutch language in Belgium.Method
Cross-lingual studies were performed at 13 European universities, using 12 different languages, viz. Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Italian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, and Spanish. Because the original yoked design did not lend itself well to long-distance research and standardization, it was replaced by a simpler, easier to replicate experimental design. Subjects were asked to mark the six capital letters they liked most in a randomized list containing all letters of the local alphabet, again without giving it much thought. They had to mark their first preference with 1, their second with 2, etc. The new method was first applied in Belgium. When results showed the name-letter effect at work again, it was copied in the other countries. A total of 2,047 subjects participated, all students.Discussion
Across languages and letters, the average probability of a letter being chosen as one of the six preferred letters was 0.30 for name letters and 0.20 for other letters. The strongest effects were observed in the Norwegian and Finnish studies. In the Hungarian, Portuguese, and Italian studies the effect was present but not to a significant degree. The effect was also found when only looking at letters in family names, as well as only first name letters. The name-letter effect emerged as very significant in all languages when only initials were considered. There was a probability of 0.46 that initial letters were chosen amongst the top-six letters. Further analysis revealed that the overall name-letter effect is not simply due to initials: when excluding initials a name-letter effect was still found across all languages.Nuttin analyzed the data to see if there was a national-letter effect, but failed to find one. Norwegians did not favor the letter N more than people from other countries did, neither did the Hungarians favor the letter M. This led Nuttin to conclude that individual ownership has affective consequences that are not observed for collective ownership.
The data also allowed for an investigation into whether visual prominence is an important factor in the name-letter effect. Cars in Austria and Hungary have a sticker displaying their nationality with a capital letter that does not match the country's name in the local language. This did not have any impact on people in those countries liking those letters relatively more.
As in the first study, the second one also included a task relating to disliking letters. Subjects were asked to select the six letters they liked the least. As before, merely having a letter in one's own name significantly reduced the chances of disliking it. This task revealed an asymmetry in the letter preference hierarchy. While there was a large consensus within each of the 12 languages as to which letters were least preferred, there was not much consensus at all around the most preferred letters.