Is your name easy to pronounce? Surely you will flirt more

We have all heard it said many times that people cannot be judged by the appearance of him, that the important thing is inside and that to be able to value people you have to know them well them 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 wishes of some people than to reality. Humans we are specialists in using the minimum amount of information to judge the people with whom we interact.

Simple names, more sexy?

Typically this means that we value people for how they look or what they do during the first few hours in the morning. we know them, but research indicates that our propensity for superficiality could go even further than this.

Specifically, he has provided evidence that reinforces the idea that some of these unconscious efforts dedicated to valuing others focus on... the name of this.

Much power concentrated in a few letters

If there is something 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 they largely take precedence over rational analysis. Or at least that is what this research conducted by researchers in social psychology and published in the journal indicates Journal of Experimental Social Psychology.

The conclusion is that the simpler and easier to pronounce a person's name, the greater the chances that our treatment of them will be more favorable.

Why is this happening?

The proposed explanation is that the human brainIt is designed to promote a positive assessment of what is related to a simple type of information and easy to process. This hypothesis, which is based on the existence of many other investigations carried out previously, emphasizes the way in which our nervous system selects the information with less chance of making us lose the weather.

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 like a trifle, but it doesn't. it is whether we take into account the number of names we come across throughout our lives, or the millions of years of evolution that have been transforming our brain in a machine to optimize the way in which we manage time and avoid dedicating our efforts to tasks that are not going to offer us a reward. In this sense, people with a complicated name start at a disadvantage.

What was the investigation?

The research is based on the conduct of several similar studies. In the first, simply A series of volunteers were asked to rate various names according to their pronunciation difficulty and the degree to which they liked them.. In the second they were asked to vote in imaginary elections 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 already they knew.

The ease with which our name is pronounced correlates with success in life

In another study, instead of relying only on hypothetical situations, the researchers decided to contrast their results with tests in the field, beyond the laboratory environment. For this they selected the names of several royal lawyers. These names were scored by the volunteers according to their ease of pronunciation and the degree to which they liked them. The most interesting thing was that when comparing the scores in the dimension of difficulty of pronunciation of the name with the average salaries, degrees of responsibility and in general the degree of prestige at the professional level, a correlation. Namely, that the name indicated a part of the professional success of these real people.

Furthermore, in these studies it was found that the difficulty of pronunciation of these names, rather than their length, or the likelihood that they were foreigners, determined the way these were valued. people. Specifically, the ease or difficulty of pronunciation allowed 40% to predict the degree to which these individuals liked or not.