The role of name desirability in person perception

We designed three studies to demonstrate the role of first name desirability in person perception. Our subjects were American undergraduate students at Creighton University in Nebraska. Experiment 1 failed to find the predicted interaction between name desirability and physical attractiveness. Experiments 2 and 3 subsequently attempted to determine the conditions under which name desirability would influence social judgments. These experiments indicated that the name desirability effect is low in external validity and more complex than previously described. The effect may depend on the favorability of the target's name and the specific dimensions on which the social judgments are made.