Does your mom or dad ever call you by your sibling’s name? If so, while you may find it to be annoying, it might not bother you as much the next time it happens—once you realize that mixing up names is actually very common!

Let’s check in with our friends at Daily Mail to learn more about this mixing-up-names phenomenon.

The study

Sandra Deffler, a memory researcher, and her colleagues at Duke University designed a multi-part study to find out why “name muddling” or “misnaming” exists and to see how common it is. 

The researchers conducted five separate surveys, consisting of more than 1,700 respondents in total, to determine the many ways people mix up names. The following discoveries were made:

• Name mix-ups were most common among family members and friends
• Moms and dads mix up the names of their kids, as well as the family dog (see next point)
• While study participants reported that they frequently call their family members by the name of their dog, no other kinds of pets were associated with name mix-ups
• Friends mixed up the names of their friends

Relationship categories

Based on these findings, misnaming was shown to be a common cognitive mistake that follows predictable patterns, even indicating what relationship category people considered their loved ones to be in. 

This means that, when a person calls a close friend or family member by the wrong name, they aren't just blurting a random name out. Instead, they are calling that person by the name of another person in the same relationship category: friends’ names are mistaken for others friends’ names and family members are called by the name of another family member (including the family dog).

Phonetic similarities

In addition to misnaming occurring based on relationship categories, researchers also found that phonetic similarities play a role in getting names mixed up. For example, names that begin or end with similar sounds (e.g. Michael and Mitchell) are more likely to be mixed up with one another. The same goes for names with a common vowel sound (e.g. John and Bob).

However, the phonetic similarity connection doesn’t seem to matter when it comes to parents and their children. Parents tend to mix up their kids’ names even when their names don’t sound anything alike, when they don’t physically look similar, and even when they are different genders! 

So the next time your mom or dad calls you by your sibling’s name - or even your dog’s name - don’t take it personally. Instead, take comfort in the fact that this happens more often than you think - and has most likely happened to your friends as well!