Jozef Nuttin

Jozef Nuttin (1933-2014) was a Belgian researcher who discovered the name–letter effect, the strong preference people have for letters in their own name. The idea for the psychological experiment to assess if there is an effect came to him in around 1978 when he noticed he liked car license plates that contained letters of his name. He was a scientist working for the Laboratorium for Experimental Psychology, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven in Belgium, a lab he had founded in 1963. In 1985 he published his name letter research. He and others have since found the effect independent of language. After a few years of relative obscurity, this effect is now used in psychological tests as a measure of implicit self-esteem. Nuttin died in 2014.