Implicit Egotism

What it is

The foundation is Jozef Nuttin's work at the University of Leuven. In 1985 he asked people to pick their preferred letter from a series of pairs, without telling them that some letters came from their own names, and they favoured their own name letters. A 1987 study extended this across twelve European languages, and a 1990 follow-up by Hoorens, Nuttin and colleagues found it in Flemish, Hungarian and Thai children and in two alphabets.

The term implicit egotism, and the claim that this preference shapes major life decisions, came from Brett Pelham, Matthew Mirenberg and John Jones in 2002, in a paper titled "Why Susie sells seashells by the seashore". A laboratory extension to shopping followed in 2005, when Miguel Brendl and colleagues found across five experiments that people were more likely to choose a brand whose name began with letters from their own, especially when a matching need, such as thirst, was active.

In 2011 Uri Simonsohn reanalysed the archival evidence on marriage, job and moving decisions in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. He reproduced the patterns and concluded they were most likely produced by cohort, geographic and ethnic confounds together with reverse causality. In one example, the link between people called Dennis and dentistry fades once birth year is taken into account, because both names and occupations vary with year of birth. Pelham and Mauricio Carvallo published a reply defending the original analyses, and Simonsohn published a rejoinder.

In effect

A brand name that shares your initials may tilt a quick choice slightly, at least in laboratory conditions and when a relevant need is active. There is no good evidence that your name is quietly steering where you live, whom you marry or what you do for a living.

What it does not say

Simonsohn's critique concerned big life decisions in population records and did not test laboratory brand choices like those in the 2005 study, so the two findings should be kept apart. The much-repeated result that hurricane-relief donations skew towards people who share the storm's initial, from Chandler, Griffin and Sorensen in 2008, belongs to the same archival genre and is open to the same confound argument. Several of these papers were read here at abstract level only. The status here is mixed: keep the letter effect, treat the life-outcome claims as disputed.

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