We have all heard it said many times that people cannot be judged by their appearance, that the important thing is inside and that in order to value people you have to know them and their life stories well .

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 are specialists in using the minimum amount of information to judge the people we relate to .

Simple names, more sexies ?

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

Specifically, it has provided evidence that reinforces the idea that part of these unconscious efforts dedicated to valuing others are focused on… the name of this .

A lot of power concentrated in a few letters

If there’s anything more superficial and impersonal than someone’s physical appearance, it’s the name that 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’s what this research by social psychology researchers, published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, indicates.

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

Why is this happening?

The proposed explanation is that the human brain is designed to promote a positive appreciation of what is related to a simple and easy to process type of information. 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 that is least likely to make us 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 like a trifle, but it is not so much if we take into account the number of names that we touch upon throughout our lives, or the millions of years of evolution that have transformed our brain into a machine that optimizes the way we manage our time and avoids dedicating our efforts to tasks that are not going to offer us a reward. In this sense, people with a complicated name start off at a disadvantage .

What was the investigation about?

The research is based on several similar studies. In the first, a series of volunteers were simply asked to rate various names according to their difficulty of pronunciation and the degree to which they liked them . In the second one, they were asked to vote in an imaginary election in which they could only know the names of the candidates, and in the third one they had to choose who to vote for among a number of politicians whose first and last names they already knew.

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

In another study, instead of relying on hypothetical situations only, the researchers decided to test their results in the field, beyond the laboratory environment. To do so, they selected the names of several real lawyers. These names were scored by the volunteers according to ease of pronunciation and degree of liking. Most interestingly, when comparing the scores on the difficulty of name pronunciation dimension with average salaries, degrees of responsibility and overall professional standing, a correlation was found. That is, that the name indicated a part of the professional success of these real people .

Furthermore, 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 made it possible to predict by 40% the degree to which these individuals were liked or disliked.