Instead, the practice of “misnaming” simply reveals something about how your brain organizes names and categories of people, the new study says. The researchers, from Duke University, investigated the little-researched practice of misnaming through five different studies that included more than 1,700 participants. They asked both undergraduates and members of Amazon Mechanical Turk, a work marketplace, to recall incidents where they were misnamed or where they misnamed someone. (Since the results are self-reported, researchers caution that they may include errors, and that the information might only capture the incidents that participants remember the best, rather than the wider phenomenon of misnaming.)

The researchers found that these slips of the tongue followed a specific pattern: People often switch the names of people with similar social relationships to themselves. Siblings are often called by the names of other siblings, friends are called by the names of other friends, and sons and daughters may have their names swapped. The results suggest that seeing or thinking of a person might trigger an incorrect activation in the brain of another person’s name, since these people are in the same social group or category.