Abstract:

Researchers explain the effect of Chinese names now more from the perspective that names activate semantic information. But judgment reflects not only content but also the metacognitive experience of processing the content. Recoginzability can influence the processing fluency, an important cue of metagognitive experience. The recognizability of a name here depends on the using frequency of the characters included in the name. Names with more rarely used Chinese characters are more difficult to recognize. We demonstrate that this processing difficulty makes people with hard to recognized names to be thought less credible. And the effect exists when the names’ attractiveness of literal meaning and implied meaning are both controlled. To explore whether regognizability will influence people’s judgment on trustee’s trustworthiness, we combined 60 Chinese names without first names. 30 names are difficult to recognize and the other 30 easy to recognize. Each name contains 2 characters. The 120 characters were all collected according to Chinese national standard GB2312–80. 60 characters used to combine the easy-to-recognize names were randomly collected from areas 16-55 in GB2312–80 and characters used to combine the difficult-to-recognize names from areas 56-87.Characters from areas 16-55 are the most frequently used Chinese characters and characters from areas 56-87 are less but not the least frequently used Chinese characters. Then we created a questionnaire comprised of a random and mix of all the 60 names and asked 28 participants to “please rate the ease with which these names of people can be recognized’’ on a scale where 1 =very difficult and 7 =very easy.” Finally 5 names with the highest scores and 5 names with the lowest scores were chosen as the materials used in the next studies. We call names with the highest scores the easy names and names with the lowest names the difficult names hereafter. To make the manipulation check, we analyzed participants’ recognizability ratings using ANOVA, which revealed that easy names were rated as significantly easier to recognize. Then we asked another 31 participants to rate the attractiveness of both the literal meaning and implied meaning of the 10 names. ANOVA results showed that there were no significantly differences between the 2 groups on the attractiveness of both the literal meaning and implied meaning.33 and 32 participants then respectively participated in two within–subject experiments. The first experiment showed that people with easy names are thought to be safer, by asking subjects to evaluate people’s names on a positive or negative dimension. The second experiment demonstrated people’s trustworthiness higher when they are with easier–to–recognize names by adopting the trust game. At last, we choose 5 easily recognized names and 5 difficultly recognized names from some students’ real names. We repeated tasks in experiment 1 and experiment 2 and got the same results. This study is a new instantiation of trustworthiness. The present research demonstrates name can influence one’s trustworthiness not only because of its attractiveness and its implied meaning, but also because of its recognizability. The findings support that tangential properties such as ease of processing can matter when people evaluate information attributed to a source. And expend its usage to the area of trustworthiness.

摘要：

从名字可以联想个体的社会身份和生理心理特征。现有研究多从名字寓意角度考察名字的影响。但从加工流畅性角度，名字本身有一个最直观分类：容易识认和难以识认。名字易识认性就可能会对被信任者的可信性产生影响。本研究共有四个被试内实验。前两个实验以编制的名字为实验材料，分别通过让被试判断被信任者的安全性和信任博弈两个范式证明名字易识认性强的个体的可信度更高。后两个实验则选取真实名字为启动材料再次证明了该结论。