Long before the invention of Reddit users Firefighter Les McBurneyHumans were fascinated by the idea that a person’s name influenced his destiny.
The ancient Romans even left a rhyme for this concept, nam e shagun, or “the name is an omen.” The proverb found real-world expression in 70 BC, when the Roman official Gaius Veres, whose last name translates as “male pig”, was put on trial in Sicily for numerous acts of robbery and extortion. Unfortunately for Verres, the prosecutor at his trial was none other than the legendary orator Cicero, who argued that Verres’ behavior “confirmed his name”—an early example of what we might now call the ill Burn.
In the millennia since Cicero’s Gibb, the relationship between name and fate has increasingly become the subject of scientific inquiry—not only to be marveled at or transmitted through epic stories but also to be empirically verified and tested.
I’ve dug up the evidence for nominal determinism, or the theory that a person’s name influences their choice of occupation, interests, or spouse, and I think there are good reasons to doubt it. But continued interest in the idea—over centuries and, arguably, against the evidence—reveals itself, highlighting the deep-seated human desire for order in a chaotic universe and the role science plays in satisfying that need.
Modern popular interest in nominal determinism can be traced back to 1994, when New Scientist magazine cited an article showing that scientists and writers often seem to be drawn to certain topics by their own names. The best example is cited in it column An article about incontinence in the British Journal of Urology by AJ Splat and D. Written by Weedon’s team. It was A New Scientific Reader Who coined the term nominative determinism To describe the principle “that authors gravitate toward the field of research that fits their surname.” (Since then, the term has broadened its meaning.)
Eventually, the idea that names predict not only occupations but also other life outcomes received a full-blown chart-and-graphs scientific treatment. In the early 2000s, A All three No articles Published in the prestigious Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, it was argued that people’s names influence decisions not only about which profession to go into, but also where to go (they were drawn to towns and streets with names like or similar to their own). were) and who to marry (same, but for spouse and last name). To be clear, this is different from research on how other people’s responses to people’s names affect their life chances, such as Audit study Black versus white is supposed to be.
Nominal determinations became the stuff of psychology textbooks. The researchers hypothesized that it is driven by implicit ego, or the idea that we are unconsciously drawn to what we like and associate with ourselves.
But there were doubters. One of them was psychologist Uri Simonson, then a professor at the University of Pennsylvania. His 2011 article In JPSP it is a careful, methodical take away from previous studies arguing that implicit egos draw us to spouses, cities, and jobs based on their names. The existing literature, he showed, consistently failed to account for other, simpler possibilities.
Conclude that Americans are disproportionately likely to marry individuals who already have the same last name as they do. Dr. Simonshon argued that implicit egoism was not needed to explain this as there were other possible explanations: patterns of ethnic names and intermarriage. That is, if you are an American of Korean descent with the last name Kim and you wish to marry another person of Korean descent, your pool of marriageable partners includes a disproportionate number of other Kims.
Baby-naming trends, he argued, were another neglected explanation for apparent cases of nominal determinism. According to a 2002 study, it wasn’t that Dennis was more likely to become a dentist than a similarly ordinary Jerry or Walter; It was the case that Dennis was more likely to be working, as the average Jerry or Walter at the time of the study was older, and therefore more likely to be retired. (Dennis was also more likely to become a lawyer than the other two.)
This article is a wonderful example of how complex and intractable the science of land mines can be – and how theoretical skeptics can play an important role in advancing it. When I Dr. Asked if his views on nominal determinism, overall, are the same after all these years, Simonson said yes, he is still skeptical. He added, “I also wonder why people are so influenced.”
To me, that is an even more interesting question than whether nominal determinism exists.
In my work as a science writer, I’ve seen that humans have a powerful drive toward theories that simplify the world and explain outcomes that otherwise seem random. In the modern age, we are especially drawn to scientific theories that allow us to tame all that chaos and uncertainty, distilling it into peer-reviewed research.
Those theories generally do not stand the test of time: what happened to the implicit ego is the usual story of an explosion of excitement followed by quiet debunking (and the continued existence of believers and A follow-up study seem to provide evidence for the event in question). But the popularity of such theories is revealing in its own right.
Think about how much stuff had to happen to put you where you are – from the universe’s existence to the rise of life on Earth, to the meeting of your parents and your early family and educational experiences. Think about how easily any of that could have turned out differently.
Dizzy, no? What do you believe instead: You are where you are because of an unfathomably vast and complex field of particles interacting with each other over billions of years, or because subtle forces beneath the surface have guided you, and we can understand what those are. Are there forces? Strangely, mysteriously, isn’t it comforting to think that you’re in San Francisco not because of geography and employment upheaval but because your name is France and something. Inside you pulled you there? Or can you influence your child’s destiny in life by giving him a name that will help guide him to happiness and success?
I consider myself a natural skeptic. Yet when I think of the countless interesting ways in human history the theme of influencing the fate of names has come and gone. LiteratureI am interesting. Part of me wants to be able to enjoy the concept and mystery of a phenomenon like nominal determinism without worrying about whether it is correct in a peer-reviewed sense.
Don’t get me wrong: science is great. Science saves lives and gets us to the moon. But scientism—the inexorable drive to systematically measure and explain everything—can also rob the world of some of its wonder.
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