How Baby Names Can Affect Future Behavior
Research reveals that a person’s name may influence where he chooses to live, occupation, and even choice of a political candidate. (Photo: Stocksy).
Know a dentist named Dennis? Have a friend Virginia in Virginia Beach? Name coincidences like these aren’t just funny, they’re actually evidence of a influential psychological phenomenon called “implicit egotism,” that is the subject of a new PBS Digital Studios’ BrainCraft series “The Bizarre Ways Your Name Affects Your Behavior,” recently posted on YouTube.
According to research on the concept, the letters of your name have been found to influence personal life decisions as significant as where you live, what you do for a living, even who you fall in love with. Seriously.
STORY: Could Your Baby’s Name Predict Future Behavior?
"We write our names thousands of times throughout our lives," BrainCraft host and science reporter Vanessa Hill says in the segment. “The more we are merely exposed to something, like those letters, the more we like them.” And, the theory goes, the more you like something, the more you’re drawn to it.
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“Research on unconscious self-enhancement – or what we call implicit egotism – suggests that people’s positive automatic associations about themselves may influence their feelings about almost anything that people associate with the self,” write researchers Brett W. Pelham, Matthew C. Mirenberg, and John T. Jones of the State University of New York at Buffalo in their 2002 report, “Why Susie Sells Seashells by the Seashore: Implicit Egotism and Major Life Decisions,” published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
So basically, people generally like themselves and given the choice, “prefer thing that are connected to the self,” according to the researchers. As a result, they found that the letters in a person’s name can influence you – whether you realize it or not.
Studies “showed that people are disproportionately likely to live in places whose names resemble their own first or last names,” they write. (That’s you, Louis from St. Louis).
Research also suggests, add the researchers, “that people disproportionately choose careers whose labels resemble their names.” (Shout out to the apparently notable number of Laurens and Lawrences in law school).
But that’s not all. “We…found that people are attracted to other people whose names resemble their own,” they continue. Even “people’s contributions to political election campaigns were influenced by the names of Presidential candidates,” report the researchers.
Looks like in addition to considering the sound and style of a name, you may now want to consider the implications as well. “The name you give your child is part of a bigger package of expectations for him or her,” Pamela Redmond Satran, the author of The Baby Name Bible and creator of the Baby Name site Nameberry, tells Yahoo Parenting. “It’s a way you set up your child to deal with the world and give them a self image.”
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