Name-letter-effect and your workplace

Seema Singh — Sun, 26 Oct 2008 07:39:00 GMT

I don't quite agree with the findings here but since Lab Rats is meant for talking, primarily, about science, rather than personal proclivity, here's a piece of news from the latest issue of Psychological Science, which I think will find echoes in the corridors of Balaji Telefilms in Mumbai.

It appears that your initials could influence where you choose to work. A name-letter-effect, as the researchers call it, could be potent enough to affect where people choose to work.

Psychologists Frederik Anseel and Wouter Duyck from Ghent University in Belgium were interested in testing the extent of the name-letter effect and they analyzed a database containing information about Belgian employees, who were engaged in full-time work. They looked at the employees' name and how often their first initial matched the first letter of their company's name. Using probability calculation, they estimated the expected number of these matches and compared that to what they actually observed.

There were 12% more matches than was expected based on the probability estimate. "Hence, for about one in nine people whose initials matched their company's initial, choice of employer seems to have been influenced by the fact that the letters matched." In addition, when the psychologists looked across all letters, they found that this effect occurred with every letter of the alphabet, but was more apparent for rarer initials.

Now, for those of you who don't know what has ‘name' to do with Balaji Telefilms, or Bollywood at large, read this.

Though in Bollywood, people don't look for companies matching their initials/names, they just tweak the existing ones. Like so many others, writer Shobha De added just an extra ‘a' to her first name!

After all, what's in a name!

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Lab Rats : Mumbai

Name-letter-effect and your workplace