Research published in the Journal of Language and Social Psychology suggests that men and women tend to create different types of pseudonyms for themselves — and people can often tell the sex of the person behind the pseudonym simply from the name alone.
The researchers had volunteers analyze pseudonyms that had been created by students to use during written exams for the purpose of anonymity. The study found that the volunteers had a better than 50/50 chance of correctly guessing the sex of person behind the pseudonyms.
PsyPost interviewed the study’s corresponding author, Dr. Benjamin P. Lange of Julius Maximilian University of Wuerzburg. Read his answers below:
PsyPost: Why were you interested in this topic?
Lange: We had pseudonyms that our students had to use in their written psychology exams for ensuring their anonymity. When looking at the pseudonyms, it got quite clear that those were not randomly assembled chains of characters (which would have been sufficient for ensuring anonymity), but that they seemed to convey some meaning – for instance on the sex of the pseudonym user. So, we looked, among other things, whether study participants were able to guess the sex of the pseudonym users only by means of the pseudonym. They were.
What should the average person take away from your study?
It is possible to correctly guess the sex of a pseudonym user only by means of the pseudonym. Also, male pseudonyms were rated as much more creative than female pseudonyms. So, even words that do not have to have a meaning have a meaning. When people choose a pseudonym for themselves they communicate aspects of their personality for instance – whether willingly or unwillingly. On the other hand, people when confronted with a pseudonym obviously try to draw conclusions on what the person who used that pseudonym might be like.
Are there any major caveats? What questions still need to be addressed?
There are some studies that have investigated what we also investigated. Still, the findings need to be replicated. For instance, as mentioned above, we also found that male pseudonyms were rated as much more creative than female pseudonyms. Is this a robust finding? This finding makes sense from a evolutionary psychological perspective. We clearly predicted it. But is it replicable?
Is there anything else you would like to add?
I think it is quite fascinating what little pieces of language might be able to tell us. People obviously use even the smallest bits of their language production to communicate something. It is a good research field, where psychologists, linguists, communication scientists and others might come together to elaborate what simple words might tell us.
The study, “Pseudo Names Are More Than Hollow Words: Sex Differences in the Choice of Pseudonyms,” was co-authored by Eugen Zaretsky and Harald A. Euler.
