People Consider Those with Easily Pronounced Names More Trustworthy
If your name is something like Joe, Todd, or Matt, congratulations — people will believe almost anything you say and consider you quite trustworthy. If your name is something like Dulcibella, Cerebus, or Callistrate, sorry — people will think the opposite of you. Yes, that latter list are real names. And yes, there is some science behind simple names being trusted more than complex and hard to pronounce names.
“People actually thought claims attributed to easy-to-pronounce names were more likely to be true.”
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If you pay any attention to politics, you've probably noticed that people believe what they want to believe, no matter what the facts say. Stephen Colbert termed this phenomenon "truthiness" because it's not the truth, but it….. Sort of is! Researchers at the University of Southern California Irvine wanted to see just how far truthiness pushes the realm of reality by seeing if the smallest factor — a person's name — could influence people.
In a paper titled "People with Easier to Pronounce Names Promote Truthiness of Claims", the team of researchers laid out their findings: That people do tend to trust those with boring names. The team searched newspaper articles and sites from all over the world to create the most absurd names they could. They then paired the weird names with "normal," easily-pronounced names. Then the team looked at how people responded to the names. In one test, they asked participants to imagine they were tourists searching for a good tour guide. Another test asked participants to select the "most dangerous" person, based only on the list of names.
Your Name Could Sink You in Court
Juries are more likely to believe eyewitnesses with easy-to-pronounce names. Your actual innocence might literally depend on whether “Nguyen” or “Smith” saw the crime.
The results show that most people will trust strangers with easier-to-pronounce names, rather than the opposite. Not only that, but more people believed absurd, completely fake statements like "Macadamia nuts are in the same evolutionary family as peaches" when they were attributed to names like "Andrian Babeshko" over names like "Czeslaw Ratynska."
"In each experiment, strangers with easy-to-pronounce names were judged as being more familiar, more trustworthy and safer," Eryn Newman, the study's co-author and a postdoctoral fellow at UC Irvine’s Department of Criminology, Law & Society said in a press release announcing the findings. "But what was most surprising is that the pronunciation of names had effects that extended beyond the name. People actually thought claims attributed to easy-to-pronounce names were more likely to be true."
“In each experiment, strangers with easy-to-pronounce names were judged as more familiar, more trustworthy and safer.”
Neman and her team also found that people are more likely to believe information when it's presented in an easily-digestible way. This might explain why everything on the web is boiled down to some awful gif.
As dumb as this study make us all look, it's actually quite sad when you think about the real implications of it. As Newman pointed out in the press release, "Just think of the situations in which pronounceability could have a significant impact on people’s lives. For example, we might ask whether the pronounceability of eyewitnesses’ names influences jury verdicts."
Ugh. Well at least we know we can trust these findings...because Eryn Newman is easy to say.
