2011/03/16 by Stefan Stieger, Martin Voracek, Anton K. Formann · 5 citations
Social Sciences · Psychology · #Social and Intergroup Psychology #Cognitive Abilities and Testing #Child and Animal Learning Development #Psychology #Preference #Task (project management) #Social psychology #Unconscious mind #Attractiveness #Reliability (semiconductor) #Bridge (graph theory) #Cognitive psychology #Statistics
paper · doi:10.1002/per.823
openalex publication_date 2011/03/16 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/23
Individuals like their name letters more than non–name letters. This effect has been termed the Name Letter Effect (NLE) and is widely exploited to measure implicit (i.e. automatic, unconscious) self–esteem, predominantly by means of the Initial Preference Task (IPT). Methodological research on how to best administer the IPT is, however, scarce. In order to bridge this gap, the present paper assessed the advantages and disadvantages of different types of IPT administrations with two meta–analyses ( k = 49; N = 11,514) and a follow–up experiment ( N = 449). As a result, a new type of administration is recommended which (1) treats the effects of the first and the last name initials separately, (2) uses a duplicate administration for reliability reasons, (3) uses the likability as well as the attractiveness item wording and (4) exploits not only letters but also numbers (i.e. birthday number effect) to measure implicit self–esteem. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.