What’s your favourite letter?
It sounds like an odd question; can letters be likeable? Yet when you show someone the alphabet and ask how much they like each letter, the answers aren’t random. Some letters are liked more by almost everyone; but there is something else that rises above the crowd’s average: a person’s own name.
In this experiment we show you every letter of the alphabet one at a time in a shuffled order and ask you to rate how much you like it from 1 to 7. When all letters are done, we ask for the first letters of your first name and surname. Your initials never leave your device; your browser does the comparison and sends us only the result; your letter-by-letter ratings stay on your device too.
Nuttin’s chance discovery
The Belgian social psychologist Jozef Nuttin published this effect in 1985. To rule out mere familiarity he used a yoked design in which two people evaluated the same letters separately: some letters came from one person’s name and some from the other’s. Each person liked the letters from their own name more than their partner, who saw the very same letters, did. The effect couldn’t be explained by how the letters look or sound or how often they occur in the language, and participants didn’t realise their choices had anything to do with their names.
In 1987 Nuttin tested the effect at 13 European universities in 12 different languages. He asked participants to pick their six favourite letters of the alphabet. Letters from their own names made it into those six more often than they did for participants whose names didn’t contain them. Nuttin explained this with “mere ownership”: what belongs to us seems a little more likeable.
Letters and birthdays in Japan
In self-esteem surveys, Japanese participants praised themselves less than Western participants did. Shinobu Kitayama and Mayumi Karasawa (1997) wondered whether this was specific to explicit statements. In a study using Japanese syllabic letters, letters in a person’s own name were liked significantly more than the rest.
In a second study they applied the same logic to numbers: the numbers matching the month and day of a person’s birthday were liked more than other numbers. According to the authors, even though Japanese participants avoided openly praising themselves, they held positive feelings towards symbols connected to themselves. This work helped popularise name-letter preference as a measure of “implicit self-esteem”.
How good is it as a measure?
Because it is short and easy to administer, name-letter preference became a popular way to measure implicit self-esteem. Vera Hoorens (2014) evaluated this use in a comprehensive review: different studies used different tasks and different scoring methods, and the choice of method was not always well justified. Hoorens stressed that what is debated is less whether the effect exists than what the scores derived from it actually measure.
A meta-analysis by Pietschnig and colleagues (2018) is even clearer: across 105 samples and 17,777 people, the relation between initial preference and the self-esteem people report in questionnaires was r = .10; the authors say the two measures are virtually unrelated. So the effect is real, but liking your initials a lot doesn’t tell you how much you like yourself. The number on the results screen is best read as a small curiosity, not a personality score.
Do people named Dennis become dentists?
For a while the name-letter effect fuelled much bigger claims: that people choose occupations, cities and spouses resembling their own names (for example, that people named Dennis are more likely to become dentists). These studies entered textbooks under the heading “implicit egotism”.
Uri Simonsohn (2011) re-examined these findings. He could reproduce the raw results, but showed that most of the differences came from confounds such as cohort, geography and ethnicity, and from reverse causality. The current view is that people may like their own letters a little more in small, low-stakes choices, but evidence that this preference steers life’s big decisions is weak.