We spoke with Samantha A. Deffler, an Assistant Professor Of Psychology at York College of Pennsylvania, who shared some very interesting insights into her research about the misnaming phenomenon. “In surveys of people from a range of ages and backgrounds, we found that misnaming of familiar people was rather common,” she said.
“To be more specific, a sample of undergraduates showed over half reported being misnamed and about 1/3 reported committing misnaming. Of those who had been misnamed, most (95%) said they had been called the wrong name by a family member,” Deffler explained.
“My colleagues and I think that this phenomenon demonstrates how people organize information about those that they know - people tended to mistake family members for other family members, probably because they were grouping these individuals together in their minds.”
Moreover, according to Deffler, ‘cross-group’ mistakes were less common “because people from different categories of our lives (e.g., family vs. friends) are not typically associated with each other in our minds.” More broadly, Deffler believes that their findings also point out “that our cognition, particularly our memories, can be flawed - people make naming mistakes even with names that they know really really well, and that is OK and normal!”
Deffler and her team of researchers surveyed people from a lot of different backgrounds and asked them both about being the object of misnaming and the person who committed the misnaming. “We found a range of results for how often older family members misnamed younger family members, but that is likely an artifact of our sample - some of our participants were younger adults without children. We did not specifically look at parent to child misnaming, but our results do allow me to answer this question,” she explained.
It turns out that most misnaming occurred between two family members and for 3 of our 4 samples, “this misnaming showed a large age effect - family members who were older misnamed younger family members. Anecdotally, a lot of these examples were parents misnaming their children with a string of sibling names,” Deffler concluded.
Meanwhile, Lynn How, the experienced educator and author of “Positive Young Minds” and this Facebook teacher coaching group told Bored Panda that how hard it is for a child to get a stranger's name right depends on the individual child and complexity of a name. “Young children are unable to form some sounds so end up calling people by a simpler name e.g. auntie Charlotte might become auntie Lot Lot. Children need repetition to store names in their memory so until a stranger becomes a friend, then it might be tricky to recall their name unless they have an amazing memory,” she explained.
When asked how common naming mistakes are among adults and kids, Lynn said they’re very common, especially if we see someone out of context. “If I see a student in a shop, I might not be able to recall who they are even though I would in school,” she said.
Lynn continued: “Some people are better at recognizing faces, not names. If the name is unfamiliar and complex, it will be more challenging to recall it unless you have committed it to memory with a conscious effort. This can be tricky as people can be quite upset when you can’t remember! I try to get round this by not using their name when I greet them and ask questions that might give me hints without letting on!”
According to Lynn, the best activity for remembering names on a recent course was to spend 45 minutes with each participant discussing the origin and importance of their names. “I embedded 15 names in my memory easily with this exercise—this has never happened before,” she laughed.
It's no secret that parents and teachers mix up kids' names very often. Lynn said that this is quite normal. She quoted Deffler, a cognitive scientist who states that, “It's a normal cognitive glitch. It's not related to a bad memory or to aging, but rather to how the brain categorizes names. It's like having special folders for family names and friends names stored in the brain. When people used the wrong name, overwhelmingly the name that was used was in the same category, was in the same folder.”
