A Classroom Demonstration of Nuttin's (1985) Ownership Effect: The Letters of My Own First Name

Abstract

Undergraduate social psychology students can benefit from a classroom experience that demonstrates their preferences for objects or events related to themselves, particularly when the factors giving rise to those preferences are inaccessible to conscious awareness. Procedures were designed to demonstrate Nuttin's (1985) name letter effect in a classroom setting. Students organized themselves into research pairs with one “experimenter” and one “subject” composing each pair. Experimenters tested subjects' preferences for alphabetic letters, comparing total ratings for first name letter with those for letters not in subjects' first names. Most subjects responded preferentially to the letters of their own first names.