Why use initials

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Leaders who are shaping the future of business in creative ways. New workplaces, new food sources, new medicine--even an entirely new economic system. An old boss once asked employees to guess his middle name based on his middle initial. After maybe a minute of guessing we gave up, in part having exhausted our collective cache of names beginning with that letter, and in part because he started laughing. Research confirms what my boss instinctively knew: a middle initial tends to be associated with intellectual status.

Think of it as a sort of intellectual tattoo. In seven separate tests, fictional names with middle initials increased perceptions of social status and intellectual capacity than those without one.

Forgive us if we suspect some personal motivation on the part of the psychologists who conducted the research: Wijnand A. Igou University of Limerick, in Ireland. As an initial test, Van Tilburg and Igou issued 85 research participants a brief, non-technical passage about the theory of relativity.

Gilroy fits easier on one line than Mark Gilroy — a decision based on style? The former. It was a marketing decision. My guess is that is the same reason many authors use initials. I liked the sound of that. Is it possible J. Tolkien was showing off by adding three initials to his book covers?

His friend and contemporary C. Lewis was satisfied with just two. Mystery solved. Now you know why so many authors use initials instead of full first name. We want to be cool! I had wondered about the initials, Mark. Thank you for the info! I have a question for you. This type of issue pretty much disappears if one chooses to abbreviate given names and only write their last name. One possible explanation is that people who reference papers tend to abbreviate authors' names even if they are given in full in the paper to save place in the references section.

Then when it comes to writing your own name as an author of the paper, they follow the same process out of habit without thinking much about it. I've never spent a conscious thought on this so far, but where I am for most business communication F. In addition, F. Lastname even if you have further given names is acceptable and normal for most signatures. However, looking though a bunch of papers, I do have the impression that this less the authors' choice than a style choice of the journal.

And some use both: full Firstname Lastname under the title and F. Lastname on the header of subsequent pages. At least for the last papers I submitted, the journal web page asked given and family name of all authors. That being said, we frequently use F.

Lastname for posters and presentations and their abstracts possibly giving Firstname of the presenting authors so people have a chance to know how to address them : I'm often involved in rather interdisciplinary studies so there's frequently a whole bunch of authors that needs fit into a restricted space. Having used "A.

Blass" on some of my earliest papers, I can explain one motivation. These were joint papers with my undergrad teacher Caslav Stanojevic who like many Eastern Europeans, as far as I know usually used only initials, "C. I just matched that for the sake of uniformity. In my later papers, I used "Andreas Blass". I might add, just as an example of the confusing things that can happen, that for the first eight years or so of my life, I was "Raphael Andreas Blass" but was called "Andreas" or the diminutive "Anderl" because I was a little kid.

When I became a naturalized U. As long as I'm describing confusions: I've been told that Vietnamese names have the family name before the given name as in Chinese and Hungarian , but in connection with titles like Dr.

Sign up to join this community. The best answers are voted up and rise to the top. Stack Overflow for Teams — Collaborate and share knowledge with a private group. Create a free Team What is Teams? Learn more. Why do people sign their names with only their initials? Ask Question. Asked 1 year, 9 months ago. Active 1 year, 9 months ago. Viewed 1k times. Improve this question.

They do it because they choose to. If there are problems then they choose to ignore them. There is unlikely to be confusion if there is also an affiliation given.

At the time I started grad school, there was no other active author with my two initials and last name.