For some reason, I’ve been getting a lot of requests lately to explain why we are bad at remembering people’s names lately. An email exchange on this with an Atlantic reporter got summarized online here:
Curiously, it then also got picked up on another site, Lifehacker:
http://lifehacker.com/why-its-so-hard-to-remember-peoples-names-1620881563
And then I was contacted earlier this week and did a short conversation on the phone with a radio show, Newstalk, in Ireland with host Sean Moncrieff.
All the conversations went well, although I’m not sure I had much to say beyond the basics that names are hard and arbitrary, unlike other facts you tend to learn about people you meet.
A more interesting idea is that I suspect there is a “reverse Dunning-Kruger” effect for name memory. Dunning-Kruger effects are cases where everybody thinks they are above average. For names, my sense is that most people think they are below average. I would guess they aren’t, but just that most of us are bad at names. In theory, it wouldn’t be very hard to test this, but I don’t think anybody has even run a real experiment.