Is your name easy to pronounce? Others will like you more

Science says that short, simple names are more attractive to others.

We have all heard it said many times that people cannot be judged by their appearance, that what's important is on the inside and that in order to value people you have to know them and their life stories well. 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. Human beings we are specialists in using the minimum amount of information to judge the people we relate to..

Simple names, more sexy?

Normally, this means that we value people for how they look or what they do during the first few hours we meet them, but research indicates that our propensity for superficiality may go even further than this.

Specifically, it has provided evidence that reinforces the idea that a portion of these unconscious efforts devoted to valuing others are centered on... the name of this.

A lot of power concentrated in a few letters

If there is anything more superficial and impersonal than someone's physical appearance, it is the name that particular someone happens to have. However, it seems that in the world of relationships, mental shortcuts take precedence over rational analysis. Or at least that is what this research conducted 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 does this happen?

The proposed explanation is that the human brain is designed to promote positive is designed to promote the positive valuation of what is related to a simple and easy-to-process type of information. and easy to process. This hypothesis, which is based on the existence of much previous research, emphasizes the way in which our nervous system selects information that is less likely to waste our time.

Of course, the time we would waste trying to process the name of a person with a difficult to pronounce name will almost always seem a trifle, but it is not so much 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 for optimizing the way we manage time and avoid devoting our efforts to tasks that are not going to 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 one, we simply a number of volunteers were asked to rate various names according to their difficulty of pronunciation and the degree to which they liked them.. In the second, they were asked to vote in an imaginary election 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 one's name is pronounced correlates with success in life

In another study, instead of relying only on hypothetical situations, the researchers decided to test their results with evidence from the field, beyond the laboratory setting. To do so, they selected the names of several real lawyers. These names were scored by the volunteers according to ease of pronunciation and the degree to which they liked them. What was most interesting was that when comparing scores on the name pronunciation difficulty dimension with average salaries, degrees of responsibility and in general the degree of prestige at the professional level, a correlation was found. That is to say, that the name indicated a part of the professional success of these real people..

In addition, these studies found that the difficulty of pronouncing these names, rather than their length or the likelihood that they were foreign, determined the way in which these people were valued. Specifically, the ease or difficulty of pronunciation was a 40% predictor of the degree to which these individuals were liked or disliked.