When parents spend hours poring over baby name books
they may imagine that their choice will have a major impact on their child's
life. But do names make a difference? Two recent books put this idea under the
microscope.
Choosing a name for a child is complicated. Not only
should it sound right with the family name but future nicknames - good and bad
- need to be taken into consideration. A name might honour a favourite grandparent,
but it will also have a forgotten meaning to be unearthed in books, and dubious
modern associations to be checked on Google.
Dalton Conley and his wife, Natalie Jeremijenko,
were halfway through this pleasant but painstaking process when their baby girl
was born, two months premature.
"We had narrowed down the selections to a bunch
of E- names, but we couldn't ultimately decide," says Conley, who lives in
New York. "Then we came up with the idea of, 'Let's just constrain the
first degree of freedom. Let's just give her the first letter and then she can
decide when she's old enough what it stands for.'"
And so, E was born. Now 16, she hasn't yet felt the
need to extend her first name. "I think once you're given a name, you get
used to it - it's part of you," she says. E's little brother, meanwhile,
Yo Xing Heyno Augustus Eisner Alexander Weiser Knuckles, did take up his
parents' offer to change his name. He added the Heyno and Knuckles when he was
four, and his parents made the changes official.
"I have been called a child abuser
online," says Dalton Conley, the author of Parentology: Everything You
Wanted to Know about the Science of Raising Children but Were Too Exhausted to
Ask. "I don't think I've saddled them with some horrible burden. They like
the fact that they have unique names now."
Over the last 70 years, researchers have tried to
gauge the effect on an individual of having an unusual name. It is thought that
our identity is partly shaped by the way we are treated by other people - a
concept psychologists call the "looking-glass self" - and our name
has the potential to colour our interactions with society. Early studies found
that men with uncommon first names were more likely to drop out of school and
be lonely later in life. One study found that psychiatric patients with more
unusual names tended to be more disturbed.
But more recent work has presented a mixed picture.
Richard Zweigenhaft, a psychologist at Guilford College in the US, pointed out
that wealthy, oddly-named Americans are more likely to find themselves in Who's
Who. He found no consistent bad effects of having a strange name, but noted
that both common and unusual names are sometimes deemed desirable.
Conley, who is a sociologist at New York University,
says that children with unusual names may learn impulse control because they
may be teased or get used to people asking about their names. "They
actually benefit from that experience by learning to control their emotions or
their impulses, which is of course a great skill for success."
But for the main part, he says, the effect of a name
on its bearer rarely amounts to more than the effect of being raised by parents
who would choose such a name.
A similar conclusion is reached by Gregory Clark,
the economist behind the book The Son Also Rises: Surnames and the History of
Social Mobility. Although the main focus of his research is family names, Clark
has looked at first names too - specifically, the names of 14,449 freshmen
students attending the elite University of Oxford between 2008-2013. By
contrasting the incidence of first names in the Oxford sample with their
incidence among the general population (of the same age), he calculated the
probability, relative to average, that a person given a particular name would
go to Oxford. (For the purposes of his research he excluded students with
non-English or Welsh surnames.)
He notes that there are more than three times as
many Eleanors at Oxford than we might expect, given the frequency of that first
name among girls in the general population, and Peters, Simons and Annas are
not far behind. Conversely, there is less than a 30th of the expected number of
Jades and an even smaller proportion of Paiges and Shannons. An Eleanor is 100
times more likely to go to Oxford than a Jade.
However, there is no evidence that it's the names
causing such a marked discrepancy, rather than other factors they represent,
Clark says. Different names are popular among different social classes, and
these groups have different opportunities and goals.
The changing name game
"Parents are now more likely to want their
children to stand out rather than fit in," says Jean Twenge - she thinks
non-traditional first names are a sign of growing individualism in society
In England, according to Gregory Clark, it has
become rarer to name babies after relatives
In France and Belgium, the move away from saints'
names is seen as a symptom of a secularised society
The increase in non-traditional first names among
African Americans has been linked to the Black Power movement
"That's something that's emerged in modern
England that didn't exist around 1800," he says. When he re-ran his study,
but this time looking at students attending Oxford and Cambridge in the early
19th Century, he found the correlation between names and university attendance
far less marked. First names simply weren't the social signifiers they are now.
What's happened since then is a move towards
unusual, even unique, names. Before 1800, Clark says, four first names referred
to half of all English men. In 2012, according to the Office for National
Statistics, the top four names (Harry, Oliver, Jack, Charlie) accounted for
just 7% of English baby boys (and the picture was much the same in Wales).
Similarly in the US, in 1950, 5% of US parents chose
a name for their child that wasn't in the top 1,000 names. In 2012, that figure
was up to 27%.
As late as the 18th Century, it wasn't uncommon for
parents to call multiple children the same name - two Johns for different
grandfathers, for example. Now parents increasingly look for unique names or
spellings of names. As Jean Twenge points out in her book the Narcissism
Epidemic, Jasmine now rubs shoulders in naming lists with Jazmine, Jazmyne,
Jazzmin, Jazzmine, Jasmina, Jazmyn, Jasmin, and Jasmyn.
As baby names become a matter of choice rather than
tradition, they reveal more about the people doing the choosing. An example of
this is the growing ease with which one can guess whether a person in the US is
black or white. Roland Fryer and Steven Levitt point out that in California in
the years running up to 2003, around 40% of black girls were given names that
weren't bestowed on a single white girl in the state.
Graph showing the declining uniformity of American
names
The implications of this clearer signalling of class
and race are striking. In a study from 2003, called Are Emily And Greg More
Employable Than Lakisha and Jamal? Marianne Bertrand and Sendhil Mullainathan
sent nearly 5,000 CVs in response to job advertisements in Chicago and Boston
newspapers. The CVs were the same, but half were given fake names that sounded
like they belonged to white people, like Emily Walsh or Greg Baker, and the
other half were given names that sounded African American, like Lakisha
Washington or Jamal Jones. The call-back rate from employers was 50% higher on
the "white" names then the "black" names. The effects were
noted even for federal contractors with "affirmative action"
policies, and companies boasting they were "equal opportunities"
employers.
The researchers inferred that employers were using
first names to discriminate unfairly against black candidates, perhaps at an
unconscious level. Those same prejudices might also come into play at the
interviewing stage, but a black applicant called Greg Baker, who receives an
invitation to an interview, has at least got his foot in the door.
There is also striking evidence of names triggering
different outcomes for schoolchildren.
David Figlio, now at Northwestern University,
analysed the scores of some 55,000 children in a school district of Florida.
Instead of just distinguishing between "white" and "black"
names, he codified what aspects of names meant that they were more likely to
belong to black children and children from low-income families. This allowed
him to create a sliding scale, which went, for example, from Drew to Dwayne to
Damarcus to Da'Quan. Figlio found that the further along this scale he went,
the worse the school test scores and the less likely the student was to be
recommended for the schools' programme for "gifted" students.
Strikingly, this held true for brothers within a family, and even - although
the sample size was small - for twins. Figlio believes that the fault lies with
the expectations of schoolteachers and administrators - at schools with more
black teachers, the effects were less marked.
Sue Yoo
My name is Sue Yoo and I'm a lawyer.
I can't say with certainty why I decided to become
one but I graduated from college the year that the dot.com bubble burst and the
legal profession seemed like a good, safe career path.
Since they are immigrants to the United States, at
the outset my parents did not understand the impact of the name they were
giving me, but I grew up with people commenting on it all the time. Even before
I knew what it meant to sue anyone people were telling me I should become a
lawyer so that's a bit of support for the theory that a person's name could
determine his or her profession.
In separate research, Figlio used the Florida school
data to show that black boys who are given names more common among girls are
more likely to develop behavioural problems when they reach puberty. The
problems increase significantly when there are girls in the same year group
with the same name.
If names do affect their bearers' chance of success,
it may not always be because of the reactions they cause in other people (the
"looking-glass self"). Psychologists talk about "implicit
egotism", the positive feelings we each have about ourselves. Brett Pelham
cites the concept in explaining his finding that individuals called Virginia,
Mildred, Jack and Philip proliferate in Virginia, Milwaukee, Jacksonville and
Philadelphia - he believes they are drawn to live there. Another intriguing
2007 paper, entitled Moniker Maladies, found that people's fondness for the
initials of their names could get in the way of success. Leif Nelson and Joseph
Simmons analysed almost a century of baseball strikeouts and found that hitters
with the initial K had a higher strike-out rate ("K" denotes a
strike-out in baseball). They also found that graduate students with the
initials C and D had a slightly lower grade point average than A and B
students, and A and B applicants to law school were more likely to go to better
colleges.
E Conley certainly has a fondness for her own
initial - which in her case is her name.
"It's just cool that people, especially my
friends, will never look at the letter E in the same way again," she says.
But she doesn't seem to think her unusual name has had a profound influence on
her life so far. "It's just an interesting experience - I'm really no
different than an Elizabeth."
Her father reflects that although his children
haven't been teased - as some bearers of unusual names are - part of the reason
might be the open-minded character of their school and neighbourhood. "I
wouldn't say that names don't matter at all," he says. "But how they
matter depends on the context."
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