Trust: All in a name?

A rose by any other name may smell as sweet, but Shakespeare's message may be lost in day-to-day reality. If parents want to bring their kids the most advantage, they need to name them accordingly - so suggest some rather disturbing studies. That's bad news for folks like me, whose names are rare, if not unique, in local society.

Four New Zealand experiments and one in California yielded the same result: People with hard-to-pronounce names are trusted less than those with "easy" names, with no other personal information given. Trust or distrust literally in name only.

How's that for subconscious prejudging?

"Normal" names are less in vogue, which makes these findings apropos. More often than in previous decades, ours includes more unusual baby names, some made up, others borrowed from other cultures, songs, or other words which somehow appeal to new parents. Perhaps that will amend the future, and change the results should such a study be conducted later.

Meanwhile, Victoria University of Wellington researchers discovered in 2013 that people with "simple" names are considered more trustworthy, more credible, at least by English-speakers. The four New Zealand experiments, conducted by psychology students and their supervisors, took first and last names from 18 newspapers worldwide and created 218 name combinations for fictitious people. Subjects (university students of varying age, background, and gender) were then asked to rate names as easy or hard to pronounce. Then they were given lists of statements, each attributed to names, such as "Adrian Babeshko says turtles are deaf." Subjects were asked whether the statement was true or false.

In another among this group of experiments, the subjects were given names of "tour guides" and asked which guides seemed "risky" or "adventurous," both deemed undesirable as, in the hypothetical, the subjects "weren't feeling too well" on the day of the imagined tour. In the final experiment, subjects were asked to rate the "dangerousness" of each name in a list.

All results, published in the February 2014 Journal Plos One, were the same: the harder to pronounce or the more "unusual" the name, given local norms, the less believable, desirable, trusted, or appealing was the imaginary person. Researchers nicknamed the phenomenon - relying on an irrational gut feeling and not fact - "truthiness."

"Across four experiments, our findings tell a clear story: People with easy names and their claims are evaluated more favorably relative to their difficult counterparts," said lead author, Eryn Newman, of Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand.

Substantially the same experiment was conducted by University of California-Irvine, with the same results. Of note in the UCI experiment was the fact that even when the ethnicities of the names were the same, the results did not change; ease of pronunciation consistently ruled the day. So the statement that Macademia nuts are in the same family as peaches was more believable when attributed to Adrian Babeshko, than when it was credited to his countryman, Czeslaw Ratynska.

"In each experiment, strangers with easy-to-pronounce names were judged as being more familiar, more trustworthy and safer," Eryn Newman, a postdoctoral fellow in UCI's Department of Criminology, Law and Society told the U.K.'s Daily Mail.

These studies build on previous findings on the wide range of benefits enjoyed by people with easy-to-pronounce names, such as being perceived as more likable, more electable and more accomplished. Why? Are we hardwired for this form of prejudice, or is it socially encouraged, if not created? Perhaps a bit of both, cushioned in a kind of mental laziness.

When people make judgments about truth, wrote the New Zealand study authors, related but nonprobative information rapidly leads them to believe or disbelieve a claim. Ease or familiarity means more rapid and less complex processing in the brain.

Complex processing sometimes signals risk in the brain, a perceived danger or heightened response. More familiar equals less risky (but how boring). We are more comfortable perhaps because we work less at interpreting information. So simple apparently equals more credible.

Are we doomed to such animal simplicity? Hardly. Like all learning through life, we recondition beyond base and fight-or-flight responses, beginning with awareness. The other answer - or perhaps the continued journey of the first - is purposeful exposure. The broader the variety of people, books, and information of an "unfamiliar" nature one seeks and absorbs, the more comfortable one becomes. What was once unknown is made known, and we are less fettered by subconscious prejudgments so that we may focus purely on fact.

Thanks to Dr. Tim Hunt for the topic suggestion.

"Always end the name of your child with a vowel, so that when you yell the name will carry." - Bill Cosby

Sholeh Patrick, J.D. is a columnist for the Hagadone News Network. Contact her at sholeh@cdapress.com.