When people make judgments about the truth of a claim, related but nonprobative information rapidly leads them to believe the claim–an effect called “truthiness” [1] . Would the pronounceability of others’ names also influence the truthiness of claims attributed to them? We replicated previous work by asking subjects to evaluate people’s names on a positive dimension, and extended that work by asking subjects to rate those names on negative dimensions. Then we addressed a novel theoretical issue by asking subjects to read that same list of names, and judge the truth of claims attributed to them. Across all experiments, easily pronounced names trumped difficult names. Moreover, the effect of pronounceability produced truthiness for claims attributed to those names. Our findings are a new instantiation of truthiness, and extend research on the truth effect as well as persuasion by showing that subjective, tangential properties such as ease of processing can matter when people evaluate information attributed to a source.

Introduction

In its classic piece, “Clinton Deploys Vowels to Bosnia,” the satirical newspaper The Onion quoted Trszg Grzdnjkln, 44. “I have six children and none of them has a name that is understandable to me or to anyone else. Mr. Clinton, please send my poor, wretched family just one ‘E.’ Please.” The Onion was onto something when it suggested that people with hard to pronounce names suffer while their more pronounceable counterparts benefit.

We know that people think food additives with easier names are safer, amusement park rides less risky, and stocks more lucrative–in fact, the pronounceability of stocks actually translates into real financial gain [2], [3]. Although pronounceability is tangential to decisions about safety, risk, and value, we know that people nonetheless can turn to tangential cues when making judgments.

One such cue is the relative ease of processing information, or its fluency. Fluent (or disfluent) processing can provide metacognitive information about ongoing cognitive operations, and tends to influence judgments most when people have little knowledge or other diagnostic information on which to draw [4], [5], [6], [7]. People tend to interpret fluent processing as a positive cue about a target stimulus, thus evaluating fluent targets along positive dimensions; likewise, they tend to evaluate disfluent targets along negative dimensions (for a review, see [8]; cf. [3]). Pronounceability can give rise to experiences of fluency or disfluency: Accordingly, people say Hnegripitrom is a more hazardous chemical than Magnalroxate; the Tsiischili, a riskier ride than the Ohanzee, and RDO a worse investment than KAR [2], [3].

Even though people’s names carry much information–ethnicity, gender, and socioeconomic status–we are still sensitive to the ease of pronouncing other people’s names when making judgments. In fact, recent work showed that people with easier to pronounce names were evaluated more positively than their harder to pronounce counterparts: They were more likeable, preferred as mock election candidates, and held higher positions in law firms [9]. But the ease of pronouncing a name might have effects that extend beyond the name itself. That is, what we do not know is whether the ease of pronouncing a person’s name might influence not only evaluations about that person, but also information or claims attributed to that person. If we found that information attributed to people with easy to pronounce names is more believable, it would suggest that even basic manipulations of pronounceability can have greater reach than previously thought. Such a finding would not only contribute to the literature on fluency, it would also have implications for many real life instances in which claims are attached to sources with varying ease of pronounceability.

In fact, fluency can have effects that extend beyond a fluent target. That is, fluency can influence judgments about information temporally linked to that target, rather than just the target itself [10], [11]. For instance, in one study people were more likely to choose a bottle of wine when the label featured a picture (such as a frog) that was recently primed–even though the picture had nothing to do with the quality or the name of the wine [11]. In another study, people were more likely to find an argument persuasive when the argument was attributed to a face that subjects had seen earlier in the experiment, even though the familiar face had no diagnostic value for judging the quality of the argument [12]. Taken together, these studies tell us that fluency leaks (see also [13]). But what we do not know is whether the fluency of a name would have effects that extend beyond the name itself, and leak on to judgments of truth–particularly in a single exposure.

We do know that when claims themselves are presented in a way that makes them feel fluent, people rate them as more likely to be true: Claims presented in high colour contrast are rated true more often than claims presented in low colour contrast, and claims that are repeated are rated true more often than claims that are not repeated [7], [14], [15], [16]. We also know, from recent work, that pairing a claim with related but nonprobative information–information that provides no diagnostic information about the accuracy of the associated claim–nonetheless rapidly pushes people to say the claim is true, an effect known as “truthiness” (from comedian Stephen Colbert, who defined truthiness as “truth that comes from the gut, not books.” See also tinyurl.com/truthiness2012) [1], [17], [18]. For example, within seconds, people judge a claim such as “The liquid metal inside a thermometer is magnesium” to be true more often when it appears with a photo of a thermometer than when it appears alone. Likewise, people say claims about celebrities are true if those claims appear with a few words describing a celebrity’s race, sex, profession, and hair than if the claim appears alone.

In those experiments, the data suggest truthiness arises because nonprobative information boosts conceptual processing, helping people generate pseudoevidence that supports the claim. But names are decidedly nonprobative, and should not boost the conceptual processing of accompanying claims, nor help people generate pseudoevidence that those claims are true. If easy to pronounce names rapidly led people to say the accompanying claims were true, it would be a novel route to truthiness.

In Experiments 1a–c we sought to replicate Laham and colleagues’ [9] fluency effects with our materials and extend their findings to negative evaluations (cf. [3]). Thus, in Experiments 1a–c we asked people to evaluate names on either positive or negative dimensions. To control for ethnicity, we created names from various world regions. Within each region, one name was relatively easy to pronounce and the other relatively difficult. Our results suggest that people’s names are like chemicals, roller-coasters and stocks: Across these experiments, easily pronounced names trumped difficult names.

In Experiment 2, we turned to an important and novel theoretical issue, asking to what extent pronounceability of names would produce truthiness for associated claims. We found that even though pronounceability is nonprobative, people with easy to pronounce names–like related photographs and words–confer truthiness on claims.