Silberzahn, R. (2013), It Pays to Be Herr Kaiser: Germans With Noble-Sounding Surnames More Often Work as Managers ThanasEmployees

The scientists Raphael Silberzahn from the University of Cambridge and Eric Luis Uhlmann from the Business School HEC in Paris found out the following: A person with a surname, such as Kaiser (“emperor”), König (“king”) or Fürst (“prince”), has a higher probability to be in a managerial position than a colleague named Bauer (farmer) or Koch (cook) (Silberzahn, 2013). Even the first names trigger associations: Teachers assume a child named ALEXANDER to be intelligent than a child named KEVIN. 

As said: Words not only convey simple descriptions of things, persons and living beings, but they are often “charged” with emotional significance, the brain research refers to these as “Buzzwords” (Kißler, 2007). Depending upon the quality of emotions, words convey coldness or warmth, secrecy or clarity - or even importance or "inexpressiveness", and all this with actual effect on the reality. The scientists Raphael Silberzahn from the University of Cambridge and Eric Luis Uhlmann from the Business School HEC in Paris found out the following: A person having a last name such as Kaiser (emperor), König (king) or Fürst (prince) has a higher probability to be in a managerial positions than a colleague named Bauer (farmer) or Koch (cook)  (Silberzahn, 2013). Even the first names trigger associations: Teachers assume a child named ALEXANDER to be intelligent than a child named KEVIN.

However, the effect can also have two sides: There have always been people who have made a BIG NAME for themselves, like Angela MERKEL or Helmut SCHMIDT, thus, without the benefit of their name having a touch of nobility or being associatively conspicuous in any other manner. Naturally, one cannot do anything against it, if one's name is printed on paper and it generates a resonance. But the influence on the environment increases upon personal interaction, each person can take care of an energetic charging of his first and last name because then we all become "bearers of the name". Our fellow men recognize not just from our posture, above all, from the tone of the voice whether we connect our names with positive emotions, such as, pride, self-confidence and sympathy. Even on the phone, it makes a difference whether we mumble or whisper our name – or whether we say it with a clear voice and upright posture – the other person namely "listens" to the posture in the voice as well. At first, people always react emotionally to words and sentences – the semantic meaning of the sentence "pales" before the effect of inflection in the voice.

A lot of Coaching sessions put too much emphasis on sentence formulation, but according to experience, only an emotions Coaching provides a breakthrough for the "mood" of the inner sentences. And as we know today, it makes sense to be attentive to the "inflection" of the inner dialog. According to recent findings of brain research, our sense of hearing is that unit of perception, which has the highest creative potential. The reason for this is that the sensory stimuli, much beyond the sense of hearing, accomplish more interconnections between the two halves of the brain than, for instance, the stimuli that reach us through our eyes. For this reason, it is not only possible for people to recognize from the "click" sound that a car door is being locked, but rather the car fans can even tell as to which car brand the sound should be ascribed. Something like this is possible only through a highly developed network of associations and, in reality, an auditory stimulus runs to and fro between the two halves of the brain up to eight times, before it enters our conscious mind (Ohler, 2006).

This interaction also takes place between the two hearing centers, known as auditory cortex. They are responsible for a lot of interpretations of auditory stimuli: The left side is responsible for the content-related meaning – "What is it" – and the right side takes care of the interpretation of the meaning of the message – "How is it". Is a plain "Yes" spoken in a friendly, irritated or bored manner?