Ifyou were like most children, you probably got upset when your mother called youby asibling’s(兄弟姐妹的)name. How could shenot know you? Did it mean she loved you less?
Probablynot. According to the first research to tackle this topic head-on, misnamingthe most familiar people in our life is a commoncognitive(认知的)errorthat has to do with how our memories classify and store familiar names.
Thestudy, published online in April in the journalMemory and Cognition,foundthat the “wrong” name is not random but is invariably fished out from the samerelationship pond: children, siblings, friends. The study did not examine thepossibility of deep psychological significance to the mistake, sayspsychologist David Rubin, “but it does tell us who’s in and who’s out of thegroup.”
Thestudy also found that within that group, misnamings occurred where the namesshared initial or internal sounds, like Jimmy and Joanie or John and Bob.Physical resemblance between people was not a factor. Nor was gender.
Theresearchers conducted five separate surveys of more than 1,700 people. Some ofthe surveys included only college students; others were done with a mixed-agepopulation. Some asked subjects about incidents where someone close tothem—family or friend—had called them by another person’s name. The othersurveys asked about times when subjects had themselves called someone close tothem by the wrong name. All the surveys found that people mixed up names withinrelationship groups such as grandchildren, friends and siblings but hardly evercrossed these boundaries.
Ingeneral, the study found that undergraduates were almost as likely as oldpeople to make this mistake and men as likely as women. Older people and thismistake and men as likely as women. Older people and women made the mistakeslightly more often, but that may be because grandparents have more grandchildrento mix up than parents have children. Also, mothers may call on their childrenmore often than fathers, given traditional gender norms. There was no evidencethat errors occurred more when the misnamer was frustrated, tired or angry.
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