Fritinancy

How implicit egotism affects naming

When it comes to choosing company and product names, we’re all a little egotistical—we prefer the sound and spelling of our personal names, and gravitate toward company and product names that mirror our own. Read about the implicit egotism effect in my latest story for Medium: “You, Yourself, and Your Brand Name.”

Brands of the decade: 2010–2019

Ten years ago, when social media and blogging were still new and a rational person was in the White House, I did something ambitious and presumptuous: I published a list of the Brands of the Decade.*

And now it’s time to do it again.

To qualify for my highly subjective top-12 list, a brand had to meet these guidelines:

• Founded during the second decade of the 21st century or shortly before or
• Had a significant impact on the way we do business or live our lives during this decade or
• Consistently made headlines during the decade (for better or worse).

Because I’m a name developer, I gave a little extra weight to brands with interesting or influential names.

A message to sticklers: Yes, I know that actually a decade begins in a year ending in 1, not 0. SORRY.

In alphabetical order, then:

Word of the week: Tinkerbell effect

“If you believe, wherever you are, clap your hands, and she’ll hear you. Clap! Clap! Don’t let Tink die! Clap!”

If you’ve seen any version of Peter Pan, or read the original J.M. Barrie book, you know that this exhortation yields a happy ending. Fervent belief, accompanied by vigorous clapping, brings a dying fairy called Tinker Bell back to life.

The idea that “enough belief in something will cause things to happen,” as TV Tropes puts it, has been enshrined in the social sciences as the Tinkerbell effect.

Disneyfied Tinker Bell, via Disneyclips. In stage productions of Peter Pan, Tinker Bell is represented by a darting light and a tinkling bell. The character’s name is spelled with two words, Tinker Bell: “Tinker” because she has tinkering skills, such as mending pots and pans; and “Bell” because of the sound of her speech, understandable only to other fairies.

 

The term was coined by a Swarthmore College psychology professor, Frank H. Durgin, in a 2002 paper about “the illusory perception of coherent motion in dynamic noise,” published in the Journal of Consciousness Studies. He titled the paper “The Tinkerbell Effect,” and gave this explanation:

Word of the week: Abilene paradox

Abilene paradox: A false consensus: a situation in which a group of people collectively decide on a course of action that is counter to the wishes of many (or all) of the group members. Also called the Abilene effect, rule by committee, and social conformity.

Word of the Week: Snowden Effect

Snowden effect: “The increased awareness of the extent and scope of illegal or excessive surveillance in the wake of Edward Snowden’s revelations; the increased desire to be protected from such surveillance.” (Source: Word Spy.)

Paul McFedries of Word Spy traces the origin of “Snowden effect” to the title of a June 10, 2013, article in Esquire by Charles P. Pierce. Pierce wrote:

It seems as though the surveillance stepped up in the wake of the Boston Marathon bombing. I don’t recall anyone warning about that in the immediate aftermath. If you want to see what effect, if any, Edward Snowden’s revelations have had on the country, and on what it’s doing to itself, look for it there. I would almost guarantee you that you won’t like what you see.

Edward Snowden is the 31-year-old American technology contractor who in June 2013, while working in Hawaii for the consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton, disclosed thousands of classified government documents to the media. Since August 2013 Snowden has been living in Russia, where he was recently granted a three-year renewal of asylum.

The Google Trends graph for “Snowden effect” shows several spikes since June 2013 and a drop in citations since May 2014. In fact, there have been several mentions of the term in August 2014 alone: see “For German, Swiss Privacy Startups, a Post-Snowden Boom” (Wall Street Journal “Digits” blog, August 20); “The Snowden Effect: Yahoo to Join Gmail in Offering Users End-to-End Encryption” (Forbes, August 7); and “Facebook’s Security Chief on the Snowden Effect, Messenger App Backlash, and Staying Optimistic” (Washington Post “The Switch” blog, August 12).

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Eponymous effects previously featured here: Zajonc effect, Streisand effect, Dunning-Kruger effect, Bradley effect, and a roundup of assorted others.

Word of the Week: Zajonc Effect

Zajonc effect: The tendency of people, after repeated exposure to an unfamiliar thing, to reverse their initial feelings of dislike or distaste and like the thing more over time. Also called the Mere Exposure effect or the Mere Zajonc effect.

The Zajonc effect is named for Robert Boleslaw Zajonc (1923-2008), a Polish-born American social psychologist who taught at the University of Michigan and Stanford University. (His last name rhymes with “science.”) His obituary in the New York Times singled out his work with “mere exposure”:

In a seminal experiment, published in The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in 1968, he showed subjects a series of random shapes in rapid succession. The shapes appeared and disappeared so quickly that it was impossible to discern that some of them were actually repeated. Nevertheless, when subjects were later asked which shapes they found most pleasing, they reliably chose the ones to which they had been exposed the most often, though they had no conscious awareness of the fact.

Familiarity, in other words, breeds a kind of affection, Professor Zajonc found. Even before he defined and named it, the effect was dear to the hearts of advertisers and other shapers of culture.

The Zajonc effect has implications for branding and naming. Bruce Tait of the Minneapolis brand consultancy Tait Subler wrote about the connection in a 2012 blog post:

Let’s say you have five potential brand positioning strategies. In an effort to make the best decision, you quantitatively test the alternative strategies. People being people, they respond most negatively to the most unfamiliar — and differentiating — concept. They respond best to the strategy they’ve seen before. The one your competitor is using already. That’s the strategy you run with because it “won” in research… and another undifferentiated brand strategy is born.

Look around at famous marketing failures and they are often the ideas that tested the best. Some of the greatest successes tested terribly because they were different. It is a frustrating  fact of marketing that the key ingredient to long-term brand success is differentiation but people are wired to respond negatively to a truly differentiating idea upon initial exposure.

(Hat tip: Anthony Shore.)

See also  “Forget About Love,” my 2010 post comparing a successful corporate name to an arranged marriage.

Other eponymous effects discussed here in previous posts: Dunning-Kruger, Streisand, Bradley, Coolidge, Martha Mitchell, Droste, Forer, Fujiwhara, McGurk, Meisner.

Word of the Week: Dunning-Kruger Effect

Dunning-Kruger Effect: A cognitive bias that causes unskilled people to mistakenly rate their ability as much higher than average. As Charles Darwin wrote in 1871 in The Descent of Man: “Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge.”

The effect is named for David Dunning and Justin Kruger, social psychologists at Cornell University, who co-authored  “Unskilled and Unaware of It,” published in the December 1999 issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

From the abstract:

People tend to hold overly favorable views of their abilities in many social and intellectual domains. The authors suggest that this overestimation occurs, in part, because people who are unskilled in these domains suffer a dual burden: Not only do these people reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices, but their incompetence robs them of the metacognitive ability to realize it. … Paradoxically, improving the skills of the participants, and thus increasing their metacognitive competence, helped them recognize the limitations of their abilities.

Dunning got the idea to do this research from a news item he wrote read about a bank robber who believed that rubbing lemon juice on his face would render him invisible to surveillance cameras. (At least, that’s what he told the cops after his arrest.)

For their work in this area, Dunning and Kruger were awarded the 2000 Ig Nobel Prize in psychology. The Ig Nobel Prizes have been presented each year since 1991 “to honor achievements that first make people laugh, and then make them think.”

The Dunning-Kruger effect is occasionally invoked in political contexts. (“Dunning-Kruger Sarah Palin” yields many examples.) The term came up just last week in the New York Times blog of economist Paul Krugman, in which Krugman discussed the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center’s report on presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s tax plan. He concluded that the plan was “a Dooh Nibor—that is, a reverse Robin Hood.” The Romney campaign, Krugman wrote in an update, “responded with deep voodoo, invoking the supposed fabulous growth effects from his tax cuts.”

That provoked a comment from “Doug”:

I’m becoming more and more convinced that, not only can the average Tea Partier not understand any of the math that goes into budget analysis, they deny that anybody ELSE can either -- even (especially?) experts with advanced degrees like Dr. K. These people really, honestly believe that math DOESN’T WORK; that nobody can know just how ridiculous Romney's numbers are. They assume we’re just being as politically motivated and as ignorant as they are themselves. …

It’s the Dunning Kruger effect, pure and simple. They assume, since the numbers have no meaning to them, that the numbers simply have no meaning at all. No amount of cogent analysis is ever going to pierce that veil.

(Emphasis added.)

Errol Morris, the documentary filmmaker, interviewed David Dunning in 2010 for a New York Times Opinionator blog post about anosognosia, the condition of being unaware of one’s own disability. Dunning said he’d been interested in former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s famous “unknown unknowns” quote, delivered in a 2002 NATO press conference. Dunning told Morris:

Put simply, people tend to do what they know and fail to do that which they have no conception of. In that way, ignorance profoundly channels the course we take in life. And unknown unknowns constitute a grand swath of everybody’s field of ignorance.

Previous posts about eponymous effects: Streisand effect, Bradley effect, and a slew of others.

Word of the Week: Streisand Effect

Streisand Effect: The backfiring of an attempt to hide or remove a piece of information. It was “named after American entertainer Barbra Streisand, whose attempt in 2003 to suppress photographs of her residence inadvertently generated further publicity” (Wikipedia).

“Streisand Effect” was coined in 2005 by Mike Masnick of TechDirt in a post about, believe it or not, photographs of urinals:

How long is it going to take before lawyers realize that the simple act of trying to repress something they don’t like online is likely to make it so that something that most people would never, ever see (like a photo of a urinal in some random beach resort) is now seen by many more people? Let’s call it the Streisand Effect.

On June 6, 2011, The Caucus—the New York Times’s politics and government blog—invoked the Streisand Effect in its coverage of one angle of a story about Sarah Palin’s confused account of the Paul Revere story (“By ringing those bells and making sure as he’s riding his horse through town to send those warning shots and bells that we were going to be secure and we were going to be free”*).

Since Ms. Palin described the ride last week while she was visiting Boston, Wikipedia’s Paul Revere article page has been the site of a mini “edit war.” And the page has gone from a little-visited one — 2,000 or so page views a day — to a more heavily trafficked one, with 54,000 on Saturday when Ms. Palin’s comments were gaining the most news attention. …

As a result, the Revere article has become much longer, and much better sourced -– a version of what Wikipedia users call the “Streisand Effect,” which is described as when “an attempt to hide or remove a piece of information has the unintended consequence of publicizing the information more widely.”

A blog called TheStreisandEffect.com collected other tales of information-suppression backfires. The blog has been dormant since March 2010.

Read about the Bradley Effect. Read about other eponymous effects: Coolidge, Droste, Forer, Fujiwhara, Martha Mitchell, McGurk, and Meissner.

(Wiki link via ADS-L.)

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* Boston Globe, June 6.

Word of the Week: Bradley Effect

Bradley effect: The purported cause of a discrepancy between voter opinion polls and election results in a race between a white and a nonwhite candidate. The term is named for Tom Bradley (1917–1998), the first African-American mayor of Los Angeles, who led by a substantial margin in the polls but lost the 1982 California gubernatorial election to his white opponent, Republican George Deukmejian. The phenomenon is less commonly known as the Wilder effect, after Douglas Wilder of Virginia, the first African-American governor in the United States.

William Safire devoted his "On Language" column in yesterday's New York Times Magazine to the Bradley effect. About the unexpected outcome of the Bradley race, he writes: "Speculation ranged from inaccurate sampling, to last-minute mind-changes, to latent racism, to freely lying voters, to the reluctance of those being polled to admitting a preference that may be socially unacceptable — anti-black — in talking to interviewers."

The Bradley effect has surfaced in coverage of the current presidential campaign, too. Safire again:

The phrase burst out of the starting gate of this year’s presidential campaign in the coverage of Hillary Clinton’s comeback victory in the nation’s first primary election in January. Barack Obama, victor in the Iowa caucus, had been polling ahead of Clinton but lost by 2.6 points. “Did ‘The Bradley Effect’ Beat Obama in New Hampshire?” headlined the liberal Nation magazine over a posting by John Nichols. John McWorter [sic: it's McWhorter] of The New York Sun concluded the answer was no, under the headline “Bradley Effect, R.I.P.”

Read the McWhorter op-ed piece here. McWhorter, a linguist (and an African-American), is not "of the New York Sun" but is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank.¹

Read my post about other eponymous effects (Doppler, Droste, Forer, etc.) here.

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¹ Safire—who once was a Nixon speechwriter and has proclaimed himself a John McCain supporter—provides a citation from "the liberal Nation magazine" but doesn't identify the slant of the Manhattan Institute. Not to belabor this, but that liberal article appeared in a Nation blog, not in the pages of the magazine itself.

Special Effects

You probably know about the Doppler Effect, the change in frequency and length of a wave (for example, a sound wave) perceived by an observer who is moving relative to the source of the wave. The Doppler Effect explains why a train whistle sounds louder as the train approaches you, and fainter as it moves away. (Update: Unsurprisingly, I got this wrong. See Regan's comment for the accurate definition.)

The Doppler Effect is named for the Austrian mathematician and physicist Christian Doppler (1803–1853). Here's a list of some other eponymous effects; see whether you can identify (a) the person the effect was named for and (b) what phenomenon the effect names. With one exception, none of these "special effects" is particularly arcane; all describe phenomena the average person can understand. Answers after the jump.

1. Coolidge Effect
2. Droste Effect
3. Forer Effect
4. Fujiwhara Effect
5. Martha Mitchell Effect
6. McGurk Effect
7. Meissner Effect