Biglaw

Using Your Middle Initial Makes You Sound Smarter

Does your name make dumb people think you're smart?

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I don’t use my middle initial. It’s an extra keystroke and thus an extra chance for me to make a typo and who needs a higher degree of difficulty? Plus, my first name is fairly distinctive. It’s confusing enough to pronounce as it is (rhymes with “belly”), why throw and extra letter in there?

Well, according to a new study, my name makes people think I’m stupid and untrustworthy. Apparently, people trust others with easy to pronounce names, and find people who use middle initials to be more intellectual. So lawyers should use their middle initials in their correspondence.

You know what I think? I think people who make assumptions about other people’s intelligence and honesty based on their freaking names are dumbs**ts who deserve to have all of their money stolen by Jack E.M. Suckit…

Last month, we learned that typos are racist. Now, a study published in the European Journal of Social Psychology shows that middle initials are intelligent. From the New Republic:

In one experiment, van Tilburg and Igou [the study’s authors] recruited 85 students from the University of Limerick and assigned them to read the same piece of text—a non-technical description of Einstein’s Theory of Relativity—and rank the writing ability of the author on a scale of one to seven. The students were assigned to one of four groups; for each group, the author’s name was displayed as either David Clark, David F. Clark, David F.P. Clark, or David F.P.R. Clark. As Wijnana and Igou predicted, the students thought David F. Clark, who scored an average of 5.8, was a better writer than David Clark, who got a 4.92. With a mean score of 6, Mr. F.P.R. Clark was considered the best writer of all. In another experiment involved in the study, the psychologists gave students the option of joining a team whose members were listed either with or without middle initials. Students more often opted for the middle-initials team, if the competition hinged on something intellectual—a quiz about literature, for instance—but not if they were joining an athletic team.

Yeah, well, I think students at the University of Limerick should stick to composing fanciful tunes rife with sexual innuendo. Just because somebody is invested in their own middle name doesn’t make them smarter, and ANY INTELLIGENT PERSON knows that.

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Meanwhile, another study highlighted in the New Republic article found this:

Another new study, this one appearing in the journal PLOS ONE, found that people with easy-to-pronounce names are considered more credible. Psychologists at the University of Queensland in Australia had students rate the “pronounceability” of first and last names from 18 countries, then recombined them to generate 218 foreign-sounding names whose pronounceability they could quantify. Difficult-to-pronounce names, according to this scale, included “Czeslaw Ratynska” and “Hur Hye-seong”; easy to pronounce names included “Amira El-Naggar” and “Lubov Ershova.” The psychologists read the students various statements, like “Turtles are deaf,” and told them they were the favorite trivia facts of people bearing either easy or hard-to-pronounce names. It turned out students were more likely to believe the statements were true if they were attributed to someone with an easy-to-pronounce name. In another part of the study, students were told to select a tour guide who would make them feel safe in a dangerous situation. Based only on a list of names, the students were asked to rank how safe they would feel with each guide—and, in keeping with the researchers’ hypothesis, they preferred tour guides whose names they could pronounce.

First of all, it’s 2014, we live in a world where we don’t have to wonder about things. TURTLES ARE NOT DEAF, you stupid Queensland students. You could literally ASK A TURTLE about this and learn more from its reaction than you could by taking Crocodile Dundee’s word on the matter.

But I will grant that there’s something to be said for having a tour guide whose name you can pronounce. “Jon, this turtle heard me talking s**t about him and now seeks revenge!”, is the kind of thing you want to just roll off your tongue.

In any event, people are idiots. Remember that when setting up your Gmail signature.

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Earlier: Proof That Typos Are Racist

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