| （英） |
Psychological studies have shown that names affect our behaviors, thinking, and preferences. Although the effects of names have been examined from various perspectives (e.g., name-letter effect, pronunciation fluency), we propose a new hypothesis, name length effect. Previous studies have argued that word lengths are optimized in order to achieve efficient communication behaviors (e.g., Zipf, 1949; Piantadosi, et al., 2011, PNAS), suggesting that people are sensitive to word lengths. We hypothesized that the sensitivity to word lengths would play an important role in cognitive processes, and that the lengths of names would affect people's behaviors. In order to examine our hypothesis, we analyzed gambling behaviors of horse races in Japan. Large-scale data (more than 80000 races) analyses showed that a simple measure of informativeness in name length (a degree of rarity in the length of horses’ names) significantly explained variance of gambling behaviors. The result indicates that the length of names affected gambling behaviors, supporting our hypothesis. |