Why being called "Davy" is a bad idea: sound symbolism and the perception of social dominance

We all have a name. However, the consequences of a name go beyond simply identifying individuals. Names can bias social interactions in both occupational and informal settings. One factor which has been shown to be correlated with employment outcomes is the pronunciation of a name. Names ending in /i/ (e.g. Davy) are under represented in management roles compared to other names. What is unclear is whether the sound of the name biases the perception of a person or whether biases result from generalising past experiences with people with such names. This study investigated the effect of novel names varying only in the sound of the last phoneme on the appraisal of one important social characteristic: dominance. Over two training phases participants learned the nonsense names of computer-generted male and female faces. All the faces were then presented in pairs and participants were asked to indicate the more dominant face. Female faces previously paired with a name ending in /i/ were selected as dominant significantly less often than other faces. No significant effect was found for males. These findings indicate that females might be more vulnerable to name biases resulting from simple phonological properties of their name