Does your drink taste better with your name on it?

Justin Thomas tells us exactly what's in a name

A Starbucks coffee shop in Abu Dhabi. Ryan Carter / The National

In 2012 the Starbucks website posed the question: “Have you noticed how everything seems a little impersonal nowadays?” This corporate navel-gazing ended with the coffee giant pledging to refer to us “as our folks intended”, by our real names.

This decision to personalise things gave birth to a new genre of profile picture, specifically, a lipstick-stained paper cup with a nickname scrawled on it: Fatoom, Wooshi, Mimi. It also launched a new internet meme, that of hilariously misspelled names on cups. I am frequently referred to as Justine by cacographic baristas the world over.

This whole naming thing is particularly tricky in places such as the UAE, where people come from many different countries and speak with a wide range of accents. My name, Justin, is fairly easy on the ear. However, most baristas in the UAE will qualify their recognition of my name by nodding their heads and saying, “Justin Bieber”, before breaking into song.

To overcome similar problems some customers give themselves a “Starbucks name”, adopting an alias that’s easy to pronounce and hard to mess up.

It isn’t only Starbucks that is involved in personalising consumables. In recent years Vimto, Nutella and Coca-Cola have all got in on the act. There is something pleasurable about seeing one’s own name integrated with a global super brand. At the heart of this pleasure is something psychologists call implicit egotism: I like thing X, but I like thing X even better when my name is on it.

The idea of implicit egotism is supported by decades of research. One of the classic explorations is known as the name letter effect. To demonstrate this effect, you are asked to “rate the following letters from 1 to 10 based on how much you like each letter: A, B, C, D … etc”. On average, people tend to rate letters that are contained within their own names more favourably than those that aren’t. This is particularly pronounced for first names and initials. This effect has been found across cultures and languages, including Arabic thanks to Zayed University psychology student, Ayesha Al Jaberi.

The effect is small, but its influence appears widespread. If your name begins with the letter D, you are slightly more likely to wind up being a dentist than a lawyer, and you're also slightly more likely to marry a person called David/Diana than a person called Adam/Andrea. This sounds too quirky to be true, but it is well supported by lots of research. See, for example, Why Susie sells seashells by the seashore: Implicit egotism and major life decisions, published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

There are several explanations for why we demonstrate this bias. Two of the most convincing involve common sense notions relating to primacy and familiarity. Our own names tend to be the ones we encounter most often (frequency), and the first word most of us learn to write is our own name (primacy). Ultimately, our names are part of our self-concept and most of us are pretty positive about ourselves.

Perhaps Starbucks knew all about implicit egotism when it launched its personalisation campaign? Maybe the idea was actually proposed by a psychologist; Starbucks do employ them. Either way, the name on the cup gimmick has proved very popular. One problem with this popularity however, is that many people now request a paper cup even if they are drinking in. These cups are not fully recyclable and Eco­Watch, a leading environmental news site, estimate that around four billion of them ended up in landfill sites in 2016.

Next time you’re in a coffee shop and you plan to drink in, by all means tell the barista your “Starbucks name”, but have your drink in a porcelain cup.

Remember when coffee shops used to ring with the sound of clinking cups? Let’s go back to that.

Dr Justin Thomas is an associate professor at Zayed University

On Twitter: @DrJustinThomas