Marketing Papers

Document Type

Technical Report

Date of this Version

8-2011

Publication Source

Psychological Science

Volume

22

Issue

8

Start Page

1087

Last Page

1089

DOI

10.1177/0956797611413937

Abstract

Implicit egotism is the notion that major life decisions are influenced by name-similarity. This paper revisits the evidence for the most systematic test of this hypothesis. Anseel & Duyck (2008) analyzed data from 1/3 of all Belgian employees and found that a disproportionate fraction of them shared their initial with their employer. Using a dataset with American employees I replicate the finding, but new analyses strongly suggest they are due to reverse causality, whereby the documented effect seems to be driven by people naming companies they start after themselves rather than by employees seeking out companies they have a shared initial with. Walt Disney, for example, worked for a company starting with D (Disney World) not because of an unconscious attraction to such letter, but because the company was named after him.

Copyright/Permission Statement

Simonsohn, U., Spurious Also? Name-Similarity Effects (Implicit Egotism) in Employment Decisions, Psychological Science 22, no. 8: pp. 1087-1089. Copyright © 2011 Association for Psychological Science. Reprinted by permission of SAGE Publications.

This is a pre-publication version. The final version is available at http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0956797611413937

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Date Posted: 15 June 2018

This document has been peer reviewed.