On Your Name
Have you ever considered how much meaning we ascribe to people’s names, when, in actual fact, most of us had very little to do with our own names? Sure, you can decide on what your abbreviated name is (e.g., “Oh, call me Liam rather than William”), but it wasn’t like you were born and subsequently presented a well-articulated narrative to your parents why you’d prefer to be named Barry over Charles. Really, your name says more about your parents than it does about you.
After years of constantly having to spell my name (“no, it’s I.E., not Y!”) and literally never getting it right at Starbucks, I finally understand that my difficult name is really more about my parents than it is about me.
We can tell a lot about your parents from your name. Eric Oliver, from the University of Chicago, and his research partners Thomas Woods and Alexandra Bass, found a connection between parents’ political ideology (liberal vs. conservative) and naming conventions. Highly educated liberal mothers tended to choose uncommon names that were ‘obscure cultural references’ like Archimedes and Esmé. They find that white liberals also tend to choose birth names with ‘‘softer, feminine’’ sounds while conservatives favour names with ‘‘harder, masculine’’ sounds, like Mark - even for girls. So, basically your parents are just using you to signal their own identity. Cool. Cool cool.
So, you really hit the nail on the head there about signalling being highly educated white liberals, hey parents?!
“Basically your parents are just using you to signal their own identity”
Want to know more about how your name shapes your destiny (and specifically, your financial destiny)? Check out the Freakonomics Podcast How Much Does Your Name Matter? Freakonomics co-author Steve Levitt describes in the findings of his paper The Causes and Consequences of Distinctively Black Names, that your name does not define your destiny.
Note: another hilarious Freakonomics podcast on names is called Hello, My Name is Marijuana Pepsi! They interview Dr. Marijuana Pepsi Vandyck on her research on the living reality of unusual names (Thank you parents for not naming me Marijuana Pepsi).
Take a second to think about the following question: what kind of person is a ‘Katie?’ What kind of a person is a ‘Mona’?
Recent research from The Journal of Experimental Psychology: General has taken it a step further and found people tend to associate personality traits based on people’s names. The authors found that, “in general, names with sonorant phonemes (e.g., Mona, Owen) were associated with high Emotionality, Agreeableness, and Conscientiousness, whereas names with voiceless stop phonemes (e.g., Katie, Curtis) were associated with high Extraversion.”
In the study, people were associating sound symbolism with the sounds of people’s first names. Sound symbolism is a linguistic concept that vocal sounds carry meaning themselves, they are the partial representation of the sense of a word by its sound (ex. think bubble, or fizz). For example, check out the classic example below.
The study found that people were attributing personality traits to people based on the sound of their name thanks to sound symbolism. But the researchers found absolutely no actual relationship between people’s names and their personalities (go figure – as it’s really hard to know a baby’s personality when they pop out of their mother). The point is that names are powerful: they can inform people’s perception of you before they’ve even met you.
What should your name really be? Let’s let the all-wise BuzzFeed decide. Here are my results:
“You got: Jennifer
You definitely seem more like a Jennifer. Maybe Jenny on the weekends.”
So what about your name? Did your parents give you a memorable handle that fits your personality, or one that they’ll literally never get right at Starbucks? Let me know!
Love,
