The name letter effect

Here’s an interesting report examining whether people are more prone to work for companies whose names begin with the same first letter as their own first name.

In a new study published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, the psychologists found that there is indeed a name-letter effect between employee names and the company they work for. There were 12% more matches than was expected based on the probability estimate. The researchers noted that “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.

I’ve always wanted to work for Wal-Mart.

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