[Vision2020] The Power of Names

[Art Deco]

The Power of Names
Posted by Adam Alter<http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/bios/adam_alter/search?contributorName=Adam%20Alter>

  The German poet Christian Morgenstern once said that “all seagulls look
as though their name were Emma.” Though Morgenstern was known for his nonsense
poetry<http://www.alb-neckar-schwarzwald.de/morgenstern/morgenstern_poems.html>,
there was truth in his suggestion that some linguistic labels are perfectly
suited to the concepts they denote. “Dawdle” and “meander” sound as
unhurried as the walking speeds they describe, and “awkward” and “gawky”
sound as ungainly as the bodies they represent. When the Gestalt
psychologist and fellow German Wolfgang Köhler read Morgenstern’s
poem<http://books.google.com/books?id=-jgN7PpjR1AC&pg=PA224&lpg=PA224&dq=morgenstern+poet+all+seagulls+emma&source=bl&ots=xSruFqfm9r&sig=pJ4oellVvW1mZ-lr_0sTwUTzwGs&hl=en&sa=X&ei=_ceoUcqaEba34APcioCIBw&ved=0CDcQ6AEwAQ#v=onepage&q&f=false>,
in the nineteen-twenties, he was moved to suggest that words convey
symbolic ideas beyond their meaning. To test the idea more carefully, he
asked a group of respondents to decide which of the two shapes below was a *
maluma* and which was a *takete:*

[image: malumatakete-580.png]

If you’re like the vast majority of Köhler’s respondents, you’re compelled
by the idea that *malumas* are soft and rounded (like the shape on the
left), whereas *taketes* are sharp and jagged (like that on the right). As
Köhler showed, words carry hidden baggage that may play at least some role
in shaping thought. What’s surprising, perhaps, is how profoundly a single
word can shape material outcomes over time.

Take the case of the proper name, a particular type of word. Like *maluma*and
*takete*, the names people choose for their children convey a wealth of
sometimes unintended information. In one
study<http://www.abajournal.com/weekly/female_lawyers_with_masculine_names_may_have_a_better_shot_at_judgeships_st>,
the economists Bentley Coffey and Patrick McLaughlin examined whether
female lawyers in South Carolina were more likely to become judges if their
names were more “masculine.” Some names—like James, John, and Michael—are
almost exclusively male; others—like Hazel, Ashley, and Laurie—are almost
exclusively female. But a third group is shared almost equally by men and
women—like Kerry and Jody—and women with those names were notably more
likely than their nominally feminine counterparts to become judges. The
researchers labelled the phenomenon the Portia Hypothesis, after the female
character in Shakespeare’s “The Merchant of Venice” who disguises herself
as a man so she can appear before the all-male court. (Note that the
experiment can’t rule out the possibility that the nominally masculine
lawyers actually behaved differently from their nominally feminine
counterparts.)

Similar linguistic associations influence how we think and behave in other
ways. For example, if I told you that I was driving north across hilly
terrain tomorrow, would you expect that drive to be mostly uphill or mostly
downhill? If you’re like most people, you associate northerly movement with
going uphill, and southerly movement with going downhill. According to research
by the psychologists Leif Nelson and Joseph
Simmons<http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=963159>,
this association produces some strange biases: people believe that a bird
will take longer to migrate between the same two points if it flies north
than if it flies south; they expect a moving company to charge eighty per
cent more to move furniture north rather than south; and, as a different
study <http://spp.sagepub.com/content/2/5/547> concluded, they assume that
property is more valuable when it sits in the northern part of town.
Apparently these quirks stem from the decision of early Greek mapmakers to
plot the northern hemisphere above the southern hemisphere—a decision that
frustrated, among others, an Australian named Stuart McArthur, who proposed a
corrective map <http://www.odt.org/NewMaps.htm#Mcarthur> that reversed the
projection. This may not be the sort of effect that Köhler envisaged, but
it does suggest that arbitrary linguistic traits have an outsized influence
on our thoughts and actions.

What ancient mapmakers did unwittingly for north and south, lawyers do
intentionally when they describe accident scenes. The defense might call a
car accident “contact”; the plaintiff might say one car “smashed” the
other. These labels really matter, as Elizabeth Loftus and John Palmer
showed in a classic experiment. After a group of students watched the same
series of traffic accidents, they were asked how fast the cars were going
when the accident occurred. When the cars were described as having
“contacted” one another, the students estimated their speed to be
thirty-two miles an hour, whereas another group estimated that the cars
were travelling at forty miles an hour when they were described as having
“smashed” one another. In a second experiment, fourteen per cent of
participants incorrectly remembered seeing shattered glass when told that
the cars “hit” one another, whereas thirty-two per cent of participants in
a second sample made the same error when told the cars “smashed” into one
another. If a single word can change how people remember an event they
witnessed only minutes earlier, there isn’t much hope for eyewitnesses who
recall, often months or years later, events experienced under stressful,
distracted conditions.

Beyond their meaning, words also differ according to how easy they are to
pronounce. People generally prefer not to think more than necessary, and
they tend to prefer objects, people, products, and
words<http://pages.stern.nyu.edu/%7Eaalter/tribes.pdf>that are simple
to pronounce and understand. In 2006, my colleague Daniel
Oppenheimer and I investigated the performance of hundreds of stocks
immediately after they were listed on the financial markets between 1990
and 2004. We discovered that companies with simpler names that were easier
to pronounce received a greater post-release bump than did companies with
complex names. (I also wrote about this phenomenon for the New York
*Post*<http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinion/opedcolumnists/trade_of_the_trick_U7gmvx2cuvrAn2SzhcZU1K>.)
The effect was strongest during the first few days of trading, when
investors had little information about the stock’s fundamentals and were
more likely to be swayed by extraneous factors. (We also ran a series of
additional analyses to rule out the possibility that the effect was driven
by different naming trends across different industries, company sizes, or
countries, and the possibility that successful stocks seem to have fluent
names merely because they’re mentioned more often in the media.) Even
stocks with pronounceable ticker codes (e.g., KAR)—the letter strings that
investors use to refer to each stock—outperformed those with
unpronounceable ticker codes (e.g., RDO) in the short run. An investor who
placed a thousand dollars in the ten most fluently named stocks between
1990 and 2004 would have earned a fifteen-per-cent return after just one
day of trading, whereas the same thousand dollars invested in the ten least
fluently named stocks would have earned a return of only four per cent. (In
the magazine last year, John Colapinto wrote about the virtues of
simplicity in choosing brand
names<http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/10/03/111003fa_fact_colapinto>
.

Even the names people choose for their children vary from simple to
complex, and that decision determines some of their outcomes later in life.
With the psychologists Simon Laham and Peter Koval, I
found<https://ppw.kuleuven.be/okp/_pdf/Laham2012TNPEW.pdf>that people
prefer politicians with simpler names—and lawyers in American
firms with fluent names rise up the legal hierarchy to partnership more
quickly than their non-fluently named colleagues. (The result persisted
even when we focussed on Anglo-American names, so it doesn’t simply boil
down to xenophobic prejudice.)

These studies suggest a sort of linguistic Heisenberg
principle<http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aso/databank/entries/dp27un.html>:
as soon as you label a concept, you change how people perceive it. It’s
difficult to imagine a truly neutral label, because words evoke images (as
do *maluma* and *takete*), are associated with other concepts (as are
“north” with up and “south” with down), and vary in complexity (from KAR to
RDO). Still, you don’t need to worry too much about what you name your
children. The effects are subtle, people with non-fluent names succeed all
the time, and norms change. After three decades of fluently named
Presidents—a Ronald, two Georges, and a Bill—Barack Obama ascended to the
Presidency. Five years later, “Barack” has become one of the
easiest-to-pronounce names in the country.

*Adam Alter is the author of Drunk Tank Pink: And Other Unexpected Forces
That Shape How We Think, Feel, and
Behave<http://www.amazon.com/Drunk-Tank-Pink-Unexpected-Forces/dp/1594204543/>,
in which many of these studies are also discussed. He is an assistant
professor of marketing at New York University’s Stern School of Business,
with an affiliated appointment in the N.Y.U. psychology department.*

*Illustration by Jordan Awan.*

-- 
Art Deco (Wayne A. Fox)
art.deco.studios at gmail.com
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