mostly research stuff
here’s some strange research to assist with the selection of your next alias (or assumed name for whatever purposes)…it turns out that whether people find you ‘hot or not’ might depend on vowel placement within your name….mit researcher amy perfors did a study “examining how your name affects how attractive you are perceived”…specifically, she looked at ‘front and back vowels’ - per amy: “Linguists classify vowels according to where in the mouth they are pronounced or articulated. Front vowels are like the i in bit, the a sound in bait or bat, and the e sound in bet. Back vowels are pronounced in the back of the mouth, and include the o sound in food or hot, as well as the u sound in put”…this was just a preliminary study, states amy, who used the public site “Hot or Not” to post photos of about 2 dozen friends with assorted fake names (that site is a great way to kill time btw…apparently at mit grad programs as well)…
you can read the entire study summary at amy’s site (pdf is there too), and you can even read the snappy little summaries from the many publications that picked it up (cnn, new scientist, passingnotes…oh sorry, that’s me)…but for those of you who struggle with reading at length, or generally find multi syllabic terms to be both visually and mentally overwhelming, here’s the skinny:
key finding: “There is an opposite effect for men and women. Men whose names’ stressed vowel is a front vowel were rated statistically MORE attractive than men with names with a stressed back vowel. However, the reverse was true for women: women with names with stressed BACK vowels were statistically more attractive.”
…but oh, the most intriguing part for selection of your next alias: her specific study name examples…these are organized as good/bad for men and good/bad for women as follows:
Good for men (front): Dave, Craig, Ben, Jake, Rick, Steve, Matt
Bad for men (back): Lou, Paul, Luke, Tom, Charles, George, John
Good for women (back): Laura, Julie, Robin, Susan
Bad for women (front): Melanie, Jamie, Jess, Jill, Amy, Tracy, Ann, Liz
…summary: i’m gonna stick with dave…and great news for my little dog emma!
this blog is mostly safe for work, though i sometimes throw around a 'fuck' or two. you'll find a bunch of my articles from CI Magazine, SCIP online, other research pieces and some other crap. enjoy. there's lost of content here related to getting information about, around, from and through people and organizations...
matt
August 13th, 2004 at 2:12 pm
I guess I should stick with Matt rather than Matthew. I thought it was the rock band bringing in all the wimmin. huh, wrong again.
Bald Eagle
May 7th, 2005 at 4:31 pm
That is certainly an interesting theory.
Looking at the names for men, it seems that there might be something to it. I’d rather be a Dave then a Lou, and Rick sounds a lot cooler than George.
But then I looked at the names for the ladies. Robin and Susan are okay, but Jess and Jill are hot and Jamie is kind of cute.
I think that your perception of whether a name is sexy or not is also influenced by what you think of the people you know by these names.
This is certainly true in my case, now that I think about it.
If you gotta have an Alias, make it sexy.
June 7th, 2005 at 2:40 pm
If you gotta have an Alias, make it sexy.
If you gotta have an A…