Name–letter effect

The name–letter effect is one of the widest used measures of implicit self-esteem. It represents the idea that an individual prefers the letters belonging to their own name and will select these above other letters in choice tasks.

This effect has been found in a vast range of studies. In one such scenario, participants were given a list of letters, one of which contained letters from their own name and the other of which contained other letters, and asked them to circle the preferred letter. This study found that, even when accounting for all other variables, letters belonging to the participants' own names were preferred.

Similar results have been found in cross-cultural studies, using different alphabets.

The name–letter effect differs from "implicit egotism", the latter being attributed to the way people allegedly gravitate towards places, people and situations that reflect themselves, including perhaps similarities with their own name.

Cause
The effect is argued by some researchers to arise from "implicit egotism" : Because people tend to hold a positive self-regard, they tend to like what is associated with themselves. The fact that the name–letter effect correlates only weakly with questionnaire measures of self-esteem is consistent with the view that these measures assess different components of self-esteem and predict different behaviors.

The effect is hypothesized to result not just from writing one's own name repeatedly, because the effect is observed for people who write their names in Cyrillic characters: When selecting words written in the Latin alphabet, these people prefer words containing letters superficially similar to those in their own names even when letters having those shapes represent different sounds in their own alphabet (e.g., P (Cyrillic equivalent of Latin R), C (in Latin, S), and X (in Latin, "Kh")).

Birthdays and numbers
The birthday–number effect is a similar bias hypothesized for birthdays and numbers.

Criticism
Its implications for major life decisions are controversial. If people have a preference for the letters of their name, do they also prefer jobs, cities, and relationship partners with similar names? Whereas some studies have suggested that this might be the case, other researchers have pointed out that these effects are nothing other than statistical artifacts.