Name

I gave a few talks on creating common grounds recently. This idea is not new, and certainly not mine. One of the lessons I learned from preparing the teaching material is what psychologists call the "name letter effect" or "shared-initials effect."

Let me give an example. With my name beginning with the letter K, I would be way more likely to donate to the Hurricane Katrina relief appeal than people whose names didn't begin with the letter K. The same applied to those R-initial donors after the Hurricane Rita, according to the findings by psychology professor Jesse Chandler. All of which is to say that there is overrepresentation of same-initial hurricane relief donors relative to the baseline distribution of initials in the donor population. Other researchers replicated and extended such experimental finding by including a patient's first name in an SMS (short message service) text reminding patient to attend a health appointment. Ahem. Adding the first name, such as John, in the text reminders led to a whopping 57 percent reduction in no-shows compared to reminders without a patient's name.

To put it simply - perhaps too simply - we simply love our own names. The upshot of all this advice is that we should never forget the attention-grabbing power of people's names. I know I should not make too many requests by email or text messages using mobile device; this I know, this I have learned in my lifetime. And then - this is the truth - I have to make online requests when time doesn't allow face-to-face request. One potential solution, I believe, is to write short request like "Please let me know, Gordon, if you'd come across cases for teaching (and perhaps even better without my name KM at the end of this message, unless my name begins with G)."