Mar 01, 2014 07:47 AM EST By Staff Reporter, UniversityHerald Reporter

University of California, Irvine, researchers have found that strangers with easier-to-pronounce names are more trustworthy than their peers with complex names.

Researchers said that people find straight-forward names more familiar and less risky to get acquainted with.

For the study, the researchers created fictitious names from different parts of the world, including the Middle East, Asia and Europe. Some of them were easier to pronounce, while the others were difficult.

In the first experiment, the researchers asked participants to imagine themselves as tourists and look for a reliable tour guide. In the second experiment, the participants were asked to determine how dangerous a person is just by looking at their names on a list.

"In each experiment, strangers with easy-to-pronounce names were judged as being more familiar, more trustworthy and safer," Eryn Newman, a postdoctoral fellow in the university's Department of Criminology, Law and Society, said in a statement. "People actually thought claims attributed to easy-to-pronounce names were more likely to be true."

For example, the participants believed the claim that 'macadamia nuts are in the same evolutionary family as peaches' when credited to 'Andrian Babeshko' instead of his countryman 'Czeslaw Ratynska.'

Newman said that the phenomenon of trusting simpler or recognisable things is not just limited to names. Previous research showed that food additives with easier names are believed to be safer than their counterparts with tricky names.

"To the Fred Flintstone parts of our brains, that feeling of familiarity signals something that we can trust," Newman said. "But information that's difficult to process signals danger."

Prior studies have showed that people with easy spelt names were claimed to be more pleasant, electable and accomplished.

"What we now know from these results, however, is that the consequences of easy-to-pronounce names reach much further than previously thought. Just think of the situations in which pronounceability could have a significant impact on people's lives...... especially during jury verdicts," Newman said.

The finding has been published in the journal 'PLOS ONE.'

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