Are you naming your kids, or is your keyboard?

If you’ve ever wondered why we prefer certain baby names over others, you might want to take a look at your keyboard.

According to a new study, due to society’s rising interactions with computers, parents tend to choose baby names that can be easily typed on the right side of a standard QWERTY keyboard. Daniel Casasanto, psychology professor at the University of Chicago, caused a ruckus among linguists in 2012 when he presented a paper on the QWERTY effect, which holds that—because of the arrangement of keys—we tend to view more positively words comprised of letters on the right side of the keyboard (like y, u, i, m, n, p) as opposed to the more “negative” words typed with letters from the left side (like z, x, c, a, s, d).

In a paper presented this summer at the 36th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, Casasanto presented findings showing that Americans have begun favoring baby names typed with more right-side keys since 1990, the year his team identified as the start of the keyboard-centric age. His findings augment the longstanding theory that people favor things on their dominant side, and as the vast majority of people are right-handed, most should assign positive feelings to the right side of the keyboard as well.

For instance, Liam, Noah, Violet, and Olivia, are popular names this year, and they contain many letters typed on the right-side of a QWERTY keyboard.

“It doesn’t mean that suddenly everyone is naming all of their babies with letters from the right side instead of the left,” Casasanto told Time magazine. He used popular name data from the Social Security Administration from 1960 to 2012 to conduct his analysis and claims his theory does not operate on a separate, name-by-name level. “This is an effect that works unconsciously and can only be detected statistically.”

For over half a century, Casasanto and his three colleagues tracked what he calls the “right side advantage” for every name given to at least 100 babies each year. Eventually they noticed a pattern: As time passed, the number of right-side letters began to significantly outnumber the left-side letters. And in names invented after 1990, right-side letters were more popular than in names existing before that period.

The foundation of Casasanto’s theory stems from years in the psychology lab, where he discovered that since people interact with their dominant side more fluently, with a sense of ease, they associating that side with the positive. They associate the less dominant side, where interactions are more clumsy, with the negative. His right-left study involved showing participants drawings of alien creatures, one on the left and one on the right. Researchers asked participants which alien was smarter, nicer, or more trustworthy, alternating the side the creatures appeared on for different respondents. On average, righties chose the alien on the right, and lefties chose the left.

Still, despite other studies confirming this implicit bias, Casasato knows plenty of parents would rather rage against the machine than admit that their long days at the computer are directly influencing what they name their babies—because that’s just a little eerie.

“This intuition that we have a stable mental dictionary, a mental encyclopedia, is so deeply ingrained in psychology and linguistics, threats to that are threatening to our mind-view,” Casasanto told Time. “What we’re showing here is a new sense of non-arbitrariness in language, a new way in which the form of a word and the way we articulate it—not with our mouth but with our fingers—is connected to the meaning of those words.”