A CLASSROOM DEMONSTRATION OF NUTTIN (1985) OWNERSHIP EFFECT - THE LETTERS OF MY OWN FIRST NAME

Undergraduate social Psychology students can benefit from a classroom experience that demonstrates their preferences for objects or events r elated to themselves, particularly when the factors giving rise to tho se preferences are inaccessible to conscious awareness. Procedures wer e designed to demonstrate Nuttin's (1985) name letter effect in a clas sroom setting. Students organized themselves into research pairs with one ''experimenter'' and one ''subiect'' composing each pair. Experime nters tested subjects' preferences for alphabetic letters, comparing t otal ratings for first name letter with those for letters not in subje cts' first names. Most subjects responded preferentially to the letter s of their own first names.