#middle initials

Elic G. Phantomhive

“Elic is an anagram of Ciel and means ‘protection’ (I’ve submitted that as a legit suggestion before), and ‘G’ comes from the nickname Gantai, meaning ‘eyepatch’. We could give real Ciel a middle initial, too.... How about Ciel S. Phantomhive, where the ‘S’ stands for Shitai? That’s a word meaning ‘corpse’ or ‘remains’....”

Blessed by @abybweisse

By Eric Jaffe, Fast Company, May 2, 2014

An old boss once asked employees to guess his middle name based on his middle initial. After maybe a minute of guessing we gave up, in part having exhausted our collective cache of names beginning with that letter, and in part because he started laughing. The initial didn’t stand for anything; he’d made it up. His parents never gave him a middle name, but all his peers in academia had an initial, so he’d chosen a letter more or less at random to fill this perceived professional gap.

Research confirms what my boss instinctively knew: a middle initial tends to be associated with intellectual status. Think of it as a sort of intellectual tattoo. A recent series of experiments document this “middle initials effect” for the first time. In seven separate tests, fictional names with middle initials increased perceptions of social status and intellectual capacity than those without one. Forgive us if we suspect some personal motivation on the part of the psychologists who conducted the research: Wijnand A. P. Van Tilburg of the University of Southampton, in the United Kingdom, and Eric R. Igou University of Limerick, in Ireland.

As an initial test, Van Tilburg and Igou issued 85 research participants a brief, non-technical passage about the theory of relativity. (A sample line: “experiments and observations show that Einstein’s description accounts for several effects that are unexplained by Newton’s law, such as minute anomalies in the orbits of Mercury and other planets.”) Afterward participants rated the passage for writing quality on a scale of 1 to 7.

Now for the twist: the supposed “author” of the passage varied for different test participants. Some read a passage written by David Clark. Others by David F. Clark. Still others by David F. P. Clark. And a fourth group by David F. P. R. Clark.

Participants took the bait. They rated the passage by David F. Clark as significantly better written than the one from plain old David Clark. The effect didn’t quite hold for two initials but reemerged for three. On the whole, the addition of one letter and one dot was enough to change perception of a physics passage.

Additional personal details negated the effect. In one test, David F. P. R. Mitchell received a better evaluation than David Mitchell, until both were identified as a “professor”--a title strong enough to override the names.

“In sum, the studies demonstrate the existence of the proposed middle initials effect,” Van Tilburg and Igou conclude in an upcoming issue of the European Journal of Social Psychology. “We found that higher perceived status, expected and perceived intellectual capacity, and performance were attributed to people with middle initials compared with people without middle initials.”

So adding middle initials may be a quick way to raise your intellectual profile. But beware a few caveats. First and foremost, the effect captures perceived wisdom, not actual intellect. George W. Bush used an initial; Albert Einstein didn’t. And trying to game the system won’t work for long; in one of the tests, people with middle initials were rated lower than those without, once all were identified as “first-year students.” That brings up a cultural caution: in some situations, using any middle initial (let alone three) might just as soon draw sneers as mark status.