How to Remember Someone’s Name (and Why it's Important)
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Have you ever been at a noisy restaurant, chatting with a couple of friends despite a lot of ambient sound around you?
Your conversation cuts through the music, the birthday song on the table across from you, the exasperated waiter bustling around trying to find seats for the walk-ins. Eventually, you don’t even notice the couple next to you arguing about whether to skip the entrée.
But then, a new sound grabs your attention.
You interrupt your friend’s ongoing soliloquy about how terrible her boss is. “Wait.”
“What?”
“Someone just called my name.”
That we can selectively attend to a conversation while filtering out the noisy restaurant, but still notice our name being called has been dubbed the cocktail party phenomenon. The idea is that even at a cocktail party, you’ll notice if someone outside of your immediate attention says your name.
While research on auditory attention is ongoing, there’s no doubt that names are special. They form an important part of our identity.
Our attachment to our names goes beyond what you’d expect. Most people are even more attached to their own initials than others. This “name letter effect” has even been found to influence our behaviour.
Why are names so important?
“A person’s name is to him or her the sweetest and most important sound in any language.” – Dale Carnegie.
Implicit egotism is the notion that people are drawn to things – people, locations, anything really – that we associate with the self.
As a teeny example, when I would play Mortal Kombat when I was younger, I would only play as the character Sonia.
One 2008 study assessed the donation records to relief funds for seven different hurricanes to see if the name of the hurricane affected donors. They found that, if the hurricane’s name shared your first initial, you were far more likely to donate to relief funds for that specific hurricane. So, a Michael would feel more inclined to contribute to a hurricane Mitch; an Alice would be more likely to support the relief fund of a hurricane Able, and so on.
The name-letter effect has been linked to how well we work with others on group projects, and maybe even choosing our romantic partners. One study even suggests that people are drawn to work for companies with a name sharing our first initial.
Names are significant. They appeal to our sense of identity, they are familiar and comforting, and things that resemble our name or initials connect to the self-referential part in all of us.
If you’re the kind of person who isn’t very good with names, you’ll probably now be thinking… well, damn.
How to remember a name
We’ve all been in the situation where someone comes up to us and starts chatting about things that demonstrate we’ve met them before. And while you smile and nod politely, the mini person inside your brain runs around like a madman, screaming and frantically ploughing through all the files in your brain to figure out who in the world this person is.
And even more often than this person who has completely fallen into the Bermuda Triangle part of your brain, is the other person. The one you see and you know, you know you know, but if you had to answer their name to win a million dollars on a game show, you’d lose.
There are only so many ‘buddy’s, ‘lovely’s, and ‘mate’s one can use before it becomes glaringly apparent that you’ve forgotten a name.
Considering we’ve just discussed how names are pretty important it’s probably a good idea to consciously remember and use people’s names.
How to up your name game:
1. Repeat it out loud
When someone introduces themselves, it’s great to repeat it back with a “nice to meet you, Mackenzie.”
(If their name is not Mackenzie, don’t do this.)
Saying something out loud makes you more likely to remember the information. Your own words can stick in your mind more than someone else’s, and speaking is a better method of retention than passively hearing.
Using someone’s name often is also a common management and sales strategy, used to build rapport and maintain attention. As an influence technique, if you use someone’s name at the start of a sentence, they’re more likely to pay attention to the rest of it than if you use it at the end.
Actors rehearse lines out loud to remember them, and repeating someone’s name back to them is not only a nice gesture (remember how much people usually love their names) but it acts as a memory encoder for you, too.
2. Connect it to something
Name forgetfulness is common, perhaps in part because a name alone doesn’t hold any obvious associations.
If you can tie someone’s name to a story, their job, or something else about them, it can help you remember it later.
If I’m conducting a corporate training session in a classroom, one method I use is associating names with physical spaces. If, say, I have a two-day training session scheduled, and we have assigned seating, before day one begins I’ll work my way around the room and silently read through the name cards as I go.
Usually, by the afternoon of day one, I have most or all attendee’s names down. I’ve connected Maria to the back corner of the room, Dawn to the space next to Maria, Martin to the third table with the seat closest to the front, and so on. The only time it gets tricky is if there is too much physical moving around throughout the day because I have mentally attached names to spaces sitting in the room.
(I have also definitely had situations where someone has changed seats at some point and I’ve ended up using the name of the person who sat there before them by accident. But usually the method works fine.)
Aside from physical spaces, you might find an association about the person (Lisa loves travelling to Japan); their job (Katie is a nurse); a distinct feature about them (Kevin has the deep voice, Max is wearing the funky pink jacket); or where they live (Jake drove down from Newcastle). Mentally recite this to yourself at your first meeting.
Many advise using alliteration where possible (Sonia lives in Sydney), but if you’re meeting hundreds of people each week that requires quick creativity!
If you consciously try to remember the name – using any association – you’ll have a better chance of recalling it later.
3. Write it down
If you are in sales, customer service, or another customer-centred job, you often speak with people over the phone.
The best thing to do when you get on a new phone call is to confirm the person’s name and write it down. Keep it on a note nearby. The act of writing should help with retention, but the record will always come in handy when they call back three hours later, and you’ve spoken to twenty other people in between.
Never assume your memory will work fine on its own if you have a device that can assist.
4. Don’t be too polite
You know when you ask someone’s name, and they say it, and you don’t really hear them, but you just smile? And, somewhere in the back of your mind, you just hope the question of their name doesn’t ever come up again in your future?
Yeah, I know.
The only time to address name miscommunications is early on. If you miss it the first time, ask again. Cross-check by saying it back. Make sure you get it. Ask for pronunciation help if you need.
Name clarification only has a small window. You can’t be at your third business meeting and ask someone, “what’s your name again?”
Needless to say, the most crucial part is that you listen when the person introduces themselves. We tend to focus more on ourselves, so we can miss other people’s introductions because we’re focusing on our own.
From memory, I think this might be part of what’s called the ‘next in line’ effect, where if someone is doing something and we know we have to do it next, we miss their experience entirely because we’re focused on our upcoming one.
So, listen, ask, repeat, consciously commit it to memory, and use an association if you can.
What is in a name?
Juliet was just a kid, so I don’t blame her for questioning it. But it turns out, there really is quite a bit in a name. It’s intertwined with who we are, and meaningful to a point where it can even subconsciously affect our behaviour.
So if you want to be polite, build rapport, and connect with people, it’s good to learn their names. Even though it can be challenging, and we’ll get it wrong sometimes, consciously committing to retaining names can help us both professionally and personally.