This is odd:
Psychologists in marketing at Yale and the University of California, San Diego studying the unconscious influence of names say a preference for our own names and initials — the “name-letter effect” — can have some negative consequences.
Students whose names begin with C or D get lower grades than those whose names begin with A or B; major league baseball players whose first or last names began with K (the strikeout-signifying letter) are significantly more likely to strike out, according to the report published in the December issue of Psychological Science.
. . .
The researchers say the effect is definitely more than coincidence but is small nevertheless.
Despite the large sample size in this research, I’m still skeptical, viewing it kind of like this:
Then again, I don’t claim to understand human psychology.
I am also skeptical on this study. I read the whole thing on Psychological science journal and found it to have questionable methodology in obtaining the sample population, exclusion criteria, etc. If the findings were true that C and D ‘s have poorer performance, then why did the authors not take letter F on a separate category since this would mean “Fail” and should have equal or lower scores than C and D’s. They grouped “F” with the other letters as one category/group. Also, they did not enumerate the number of C and D population compared to the other letters. I am not sure if people with C and D number more than other letters. They also excluded people who have both “A and D, A and C, B and D, B and C” first and last initials… they could have well removed a confounder that would have helped counteract the hypothesis. I think the study is poorly executed and planned, the discussion full of generalizations and lack of self analysis on their work, for sources of possible errors… which most good studies would enumerate. I find this just attention grabbing only