Imagine you’re at a grocery store trying to decide between two brands of potato chips. One brand has a name like ‘P-T-K’ while the other has a name like ‘K-T-P’. According to the in-out effect, the first brand name is likely to make you feel more positive about it than the second one! This phenomenon, where consonants in words follow an inward-wandering pattern or an outward-wandering pattern, has been observed with made-up words. But does it hold true for real words too? And does it also affect how we talk about things? Two big studies aimed to answer these questions. Study 1 looked at people’s ratings of real English and Dutch words with inward-wandering versus outward-wandering consonants, but no clear relationship between word direction and affective valence was found. Study 2 explored whether positive online restaurant reviews were more likely to contain inward-wandering words, but once again, no consistent association was found. These findings suggest that while the in-out effect might influence our judgments in some cases, it doesn’t have a strong impact on the actual composition of words in a language.

Abstract
The in-out effect refers to the tendency that novel words whose consonants follow an inward-wandering pattern (e.g., P-T-K) are rated more positively than stimuli whose consonants follow an outward-wandering pattern (e.g., K-T-P). While this effect appears to be reliable, it is not yet clear to what extent it generalizes to existing words in a language. In two large-scale studies, we sought to extend the in-out effect from pseudowords to real words and from perception to production. In Study 1, we investigated whether previously collected affective ratings for English and Dutch words were more positive for inward-wandering words and more negative for outward-wandering words. No systematic relationship between wandering direction and affective valence was found. In Study 2, we investigated whether inward-wandering words are more likely to occur in positive online consumer restaurant reviews written in English and Dutch, compared to negative reviews, and whether this association was stronger for food ratings than for decor ratings. Again, no systematic relationship between wandering direction and review rating emerged. We suggest that the affective states triggered by different consonantal wandering directions might be used as a cue for forming judgments in the absence of other information, but that wandering direction is too low in salience to drive the shape of words in the lexicon.

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