We Believe People With Easy-to-Pronounce Names, Says Science

According to a new study, people are less likely to believe information if it comes from a person whose name is difficult for them to pronounce.

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The study was conducted with college undergrads in New Zealand and Canada. The students were first asked to rank the "pronounceability" of real names from 18 different languages. Then, the students were given a list of possibly real, possibly fake facts attributed to people with a range of invented names. The students were much more likely to believe that "Putali Angami" was truthful than "Yevgeni Dzherzhinsky," because, according to the study's participants, "Putali Angami" was easier to pronounce.

The study authors said the results show the way that our own subconscious opinions can affect not only who we believe, but who we hire for a job and who we decide to buy things from.

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"The results from these experiments showed that people with easier to pronounce names were judged as more familiar, less risky and less dangerous than individuals with difficult to pronounce names," Matti Vuorre explained in Scientific American. Of course, he pointed out, "difficult to pronounce" depends totally on what your native language is. "So, who would you pick as your tandem skydiving partner, Bodo or Czeslaw? If you are anything like most English speaking people, you would be likely to prefer jumping out of the plane with Bodo. If, on the other hand, you find Polish easier to pronounce, you would probably choose to jump with Czeslaw."

In the United States, these subconscious beliefs about names sometimes seep into the workplace. A separate study conducted over several years in the United States, and published in 2013, showed that immigrants who "Americanized" their names were more likely to get jobs than ones who opted not to. They also ended up making more money.

There are major race and gender-related implications in deciding whose name is perceived to be more pronounceable. Some names fall in and out of fashion, and a celebrity with an uncommon name can make their moniker go mainstream — after all, a lot more Americans can pronounce "Schwarzenegger" or "Ejiofor" now than they could two decades ago.

The impact of gender was studied in a 2009 survey on female judges in South Carolina. Two professors from George Mason University found that female attorneys in the state were more likely to win judgeships if they had a gender-neutral or ambiguous name like Terry or Kelly than if they had a more traditionally feminine ones like Susan or Laurie. One of the professors who authored the study was so convinced of the power of gender-neutral names that he named his own daughter Collins.

And Vuorre, who has a somewhat hard-to-pronounce name himself, was hyperaware of these facts as he wrote his story: "As a recent immigrant to the United States, I wonder whether I should worry about the potential negative implications of my name on my future career success. At the very least, as Dr. Newman and her colleagues’ results suggest: People might find this article to be more credible if I had a different name. Or, as I like to think, you are less likely to go skydiving with me than you would be if my name was Brad Pitt."

"Brad Pitt" may be pretty easy to pronounce, but what happens to his children who have names like Zahara and Shiloh (as two of his kids do)? Something tells us they'll be just fine when it comes to the making-money department.