발음하기 힘든 이름은 성공하기 어렵다.

발음하기 좋은 이름을 가진 사람이 평판도 좋고 성공하는 데에도 유리하다.

Simon M. Laham, Peter Koval, and Adam L. Alter의 연구결과에 따르면,
발음이 쉬운 이름이 어려운 발음의 이음에 비해 훨씬 긍정적인 인상을 준다고 한다.

연구 중에는 로펌 변호사들의 이름과 직위의 상관관계를 분석한 것도 있다.
여기서도 발음이 쉬운 이름이 로펌의 직제 내에서 상대적으로 더 높은 직위를 차지하고 있더라고..



Bad News for People With Hard-to-Pronounce Names

If you have one of those names that people are always struggling to pronounce, we have some bad news for you.

A new paper (ungated version here) by Simon M. Laham, Peter Koval, and Adam L. Alter finds that an easy name may confer advantages. The authors conducted five studies comparing easy- and hard-to-pronounce names (like Vougiouklakis or Leszczynska, for example): “Studies 1–3 demonstrate that people form more positive impressions of easy-to-pronounce names than of difficult-to-pronounce names.” While the first three studies focused on surnames, a fifth study analyzed both the first and last names of lawyers within law firms and found that “lawyers with more easily pronounceable names occupied superior positions within their firm hierarchy … The effect was independent of firm size, firm ranking, or mean associate salary.” Furthermore, the authors found that “the effect is independent of name length (Studies 1, 2, and 4), orthographic regularity (Studies 1, 2, and 4), unusualness (Studies 1 and 3), name typicality (Study 3), and name foreignness (Study 5).”

Laham hopes the research will open people’s eyes to their own unrecognized biases: “Such an appreciation may help us de-bias our thinking, leading to fairer, more objective treatment of others.”

(HT: Cyril Morong)

출처:
http://www.freakonomics.com/2012/02/28/bad-news-for-people-with-hard-to-pronounce-names/
The name-pronunciation effect: Why people like Mr. Smith more than Mr. Colquhoun
http://ppw.kuleuven.be/okp/_pdf/Laham2012TNPEW.pdf