> Studies have shown that people love to hear their name.
That's not, it seems at the moment, what that study said. It seems to say that areas of the brain responsible for self-representation seem to activate when people hear their own names:
> 3.4. Conclusions
> The findings of this simple paradigm are consistent with the findings in the literature. There is unique brain activation specific to one’s own name in relation to the names of others. In addition, the patterns of activation when hearing one’s own name relative to hearing the names of others are similar to the patterns reported when individuals make judgments about themselves and their personal qualities, and include the regions of the medial frontal cortex and superior temporal cortex near the temporo-parietal junction. These results will enable us to study young children and even infants’ responses to their own names in order to see when self representation first occurs.
It may, of course, be true that people like to hear their own names. It seems rare for someone to go bankrupt gambling on how interested in themselves people can be. But just the same...
Personally I hate it when my name's overused; it makes me feel as if I'm talking to a pushy sales guy / the person using it gets a high score on either the "creepy" or "slimey" meter.
"John, I'm so glad you downloaded a copy of MegaThingyFoo. I know that you, John, like myself must have to struggle with generic problem which MegaThingyFoo is supposed to resolve. John; if you could provide me with some feedback on this product I'd be eternally grateful." Eugh!
I have a feeling that as soon as these studies are made public they begin to effect their own findings - i.e. those who can take advantage of the findings do and for a while this works. However as this becomes standard people build up a social immunity to these tricks (either through familiarity with the texts (social vaccination) or through exposure to the users of such techniques (previous infection).
I'd be interested to see a fake study published which claimed something like "People who wear yellow ties generally make 1% more sales", when in fact genuine studies show that tie colour has no effect. 5-10 years later repeat the genuine study and (assuming this fake knowledge went viral) I suspect you'd find people who wore yellow ties would fall behind other tie colours on sales.
That's not, it seems at the moment, what that study said. It seems to say that areas of the brain responsible for self-representation seem to activate when people hear their own names:
> 3.4. Conclusions
> The findings of this simple paradigm are consistent with the findings in the literature. There is unique brain activation specific to one’s own name in relation to the names of others. In addition, the patterns of activation when hearing one’s own name relative to hearing the names of others are similar to the patterns reported when individuals make judgments about themselves and their personal qualities, and include the regions of the medial frontal cortex and superior temporal cortex near the temporo-parietal junction. These results will enable us to study young children and even infants’ responses to their own names in order to see when self representation first occurs.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1647299/
It may, of course, be true that people like to hear their own names. It seems rare for someone to go bankrupt gambling on how interested in themselves people can be. But just the same...