The Effect of Hard to Pronounce Names on the Stock Market

In a field study, researchers sent text message reminders to people accused of low level offences reminding them to appear in court for their court date. Just sending the text message increased attendance from 30% to 38%. For those who did show up, two thirds of the cases were dismissed - 780 fewer people ended up in jail just because of this one intervention. Robert Chaldini's book, Pre-Swasion, arguably has an even more memorable study on making it easy. He looks at names of 100 attorneys at 10 US law firms and finds that the harder an attorney's name was to pronounce, the lower he or she stayed in the firm's hierarchy. This effect held independent of the foreignness