Is your name spiky or round? Scientific study shows people judge you based on the sound of your name

This hypothesis is round like bullshit and the similarities don’t stop there!

Very interesting. I just recently changed my name and never thought to consider anything like this while picking it out. Not that I would have picked differently, but it does go to show how many different subconscious factors there are in others’ perceptions of you.

Mostly on the floor in front of doors

I don’t know about specifics of round and spiky, but I think there’s something to this… at least more so than the incredulous commenters here seem to think.

When I was a kid I would very much associate the names of people with other things they sound like, and from there would make the wild leap of extrapolating imagined personalities of these people. In the case of truly exotic names I think I would fall back on different heuristics if, for example, someone’s name prominently featured an unusual letter like an X or Z.

Because this was all in my head, there was nobody to tell me that it was all made-up woo; I had to learn from the experience of people constantly failing to meet my imagined impression of them. I grew out of doing this decades ago, probably because I had enough experience of meeting multiple “examples” of many names, but also because I’m not a kid desperately trying to make sense of everything going on around me.

I wouldn’t be shocked if I still subconsciously do it a little, if a name’s weird enough. Xs… kind of make me think of ninjas.

edit: Oh hey, right in the abstract:

Individuals also associate different kinds of personalities with given names on the basis of the sounds the names contain.

1 Like

I wondered about the association made when people have met others with the same name. There might be more of an expectation based on that than how the name sounds. :thinking:

1 Like

It all depends on how closely you look at it, at least according to Alan Watts.

1 Like

This topic was automatically closed after 5 days. New replies are no longer allowed.