Personally I hate it when my name's overused; it makes me feel as if I'm talking to a pushy sales guy / the person using it gets a high score on either the "cre

Personally I hate it when my name's overused; it makes me feel as if I'm talking to a pushy sales guy / the person using it gets a high score on either the "creepy" or "slimey" meter. "John, I'm so glad you downloaded a copy of MegaThingyFoo. I know that you, John, like myself must have to struggle with generic problem which MegaThingyFoo is supposed to resolve. John; if you could provide me with some feedback on this product I'd be eternally grateful." Eugh! I have a feeling that as soon as these studies are made public they begin to effect their own findings - i.e. those who can take advantage of the findings do and for a while this works. However as this becomes standard people build up a social immunity to these tricks (either through familiarity with the texts (social vaccination) or through exposure to the users of such techniques (previous infection). I'd be interested to see a fake study published which claimed something like "People who wear yellow ties generally make 1% more sales", when in fact genuine studies show that tie colour has no effect. 5-10 years later repeat the genuine study and (assuming this fake knowledge went viral) I suspect you'd find people who wore yellow ties would fall behind other tie colours on sales.