Unconscious Applicants: A Systematic Test of the Name-Letter Effect

Abstract

It is now generally accepted that unconscious processesmodulate human behavior. Nelson and Simmons (2007) provided a thoughtprovoking illustration of this phenomenon. They demonstrated that people’s unconscious preferences for the letters in their own names are strong enough that people pursue name-related performance outcomes that they would consciously avoid. For instance, although most students consciously strive to earn As, students whose names begin with C andD have lower grade point averages (GPAs) than do students whose names begin with A and B. These findings build on previous research on the name-letter effect (NLE), which is the tendency to evaluate letters in one’s name more favorably than other letters. The influence of this implicit preference is striking: It affects important decisions, such as where people choose to live and whom they decide to marry (Pelham, Carvallo, & Jones, 2005). However, NLE studies have not gone unchallenged. As did previous work, Nelson and Simmons’s (2007) study suffered from a number of limitations that may compromise its interpretation as demonstrating the NLE. We conducted a large-scale study to investigate whether people whose names begin with a given letter have a tendency to work for companies with names that begin with the same letter. Our study addresses the limitations of previous work and extends the existing NLE literature in four ways. First, researchers have typically sampled a few letters or names to test for nameinitial-congruent outcomes (e.g., is Jack more likely to live in Jacksonville than in Philadelphia; see Pelham, Mirenberg, & Jones, 2002). As Gallucci (2003) argued, these tests ‘‘can yield significant results due to spurious effects and sampling biases’’ (p. 789), so interpretation of the results as demonstrating the NLE is compromised. Even (or especially) when specific cases are sampled from very large databases (e.g., when the frequencies of two names in two cities are compared in a 2 2 table; Pelham et al., 2002), findings may be an artifact of ‘‘luck’’ in choosing two of the many possible names or letters for testing. The first four of five studies by Nelson and Simmons (2007) also had this problem: For instance, when testing for an NLE on GPAs, they compared only students with the initials A and B against those with the initials C and D. However, although students with the initials C and D received somewhat lower GPAs (i.e., on average, approximately 3.35, vs. 3.37 for students with initials A and B), such small variations might also have been observed for other initials. Maybe students with the initial M also had lower GPAs than students whose names began with A or B. In Nelson and Simmons’s elegant fifth study, NLEs were obtained with a wider range of initials. Unfortunately, these findings were constrained by the limitations of the laboratory (e.g., results may have been affected by demand characteristics) and lack ecological validity. The study we report in this article offers a convincing supplement to the NLE literature because the design encompassed all letters in a very large sample of realworld behavior: job choice. Thus, our study was not susceptible to the risk of sampling bias present in previous operationalizations of the NLE. Second, it is important theoretically to establish the boundary conditions for psychological phenomena, particularly when they are provocative and surprising. The best way to explore these boundaries for the NLE is to put them in direct competition with behavior driven by conscious thought. Rational and deliberate thinking processes guide job choice: Applicants are attracted by objective job and organizational attributes, such as salary, job content, and location (Chapman, Uggerslev, Carroll, Piasentin, & Jones, 2005). Therefore, job choice is a theoretically challenging case for the NLE. Third, although researchers have claimed that NLEs are stronger for less frequent letters and names, which are more distinctive (Pelham et al., 2005), tests of this hypothesis have not confirmed it. Jones, Pelham, Mirenberg, and Hets (2002) even found a numerical tendency toward larger NLEs for names with more frequent initials. The design of the present study allowed a more comprehensive test of this hypothesis, so that the study might contribute to a better theoretical understanding of the mechanisms involved in the NLE. Fourth, given the lack of large and systematic data sets with accurate a priori frequency estimates, reliable estimates of the size of the NLE on real-world behavior are not available. From a conceptual standpoint, such estimates are crucial for comparing Address correspondence to Frederik Anseel, Department of Personnel Management, Work and Organizational Psychology, Ghent University, Henri Dunantlaan 2, B-9000 Ghent, Belgium, e-mail: frederik.anseel@ugent.be. PSYCHOLOGICAL SCIENCE