Does Your Name Determine Your Future?

has a name. I just gave you mine. That's extraordinary, though, when you think about it, because it's one of the very few social things that all human beings have in common. No matter who you are, where you live, or what you do with your life, you and everyone else has a name. You might be a Kevin, a Felicia, a Mohammed, a Holly, and so on. It's part of your identity and helped separate you from the teeming mass of humanity. But how much does your name affect you? Could it

determine your future? Well, it doesn't determine your life exactly. Economists Steve Levitt and Roland Friar studied decades worth of children's names, only to find that what your parents name you doesn't really impact your economic future. So you're not doomed to poverty just because your name is Earnest or something. But your name will certainly affect your future. A study called are You Ready? Are Emily and Greg more employable than Lakisha and Jamal unearthed at least one disturbing trend

about names. Job applicants with equal qualifications or even otherwise identical resumes are about fifty more likely to get a callback if they have a white sounding name. This indicates that despite numerous laws, discrimination still thrives in the workplace. Your name doesn't just tell people about you. It tells people about your parents and gives them away to place you in their vision of society. This isn't about whether

their vision is correct. That's prejudice, but it does affect how people with these expectations in mindsets will address and interact with you. And that's not all. Your name may also play a role in your career. This theory is called nominative determinism, the idea that your name may affect the way you interact with the world, including anything from donations to your choice of career. For example, is someone

named Helen Painter more likely to be an artist? Or is someone named Jimmy Hogg more likely to work with pigs. Matthew Meirenberg and John Jones think so in their study and here we go with another name, Why Susie sells Seashells by the Sea Shore Implicit Egotism and Major Life Decisions classic academic title. These researchers found that people are more likely to choose careers whose labels resemble their own names. So, to use one of their examples, people named Dennis or

Denise are overrepresented among can you guess it Yeah? Dentists. Dentists Dennis, Denise. Mehrenberg and Jones believe this happens because people prefer things that they connect with themselves, including their own names. Other scientists, like University of Pennsylvania's Uri Simonson, are skeptical about this whole idea. Are we drawing tenuous

conclusions where none exist just to support a neat idea? Well, for the record, Simonson does suppose that nominative determinism might explain why people named Rachel might be more likely to donate in the wake of Hurricane Rhea. Because, as weird as this might sound, that similarity just starting with the letter are triggered some sense of identification. We haven't even talked about name changes or the weird name changes people have tried in court. I'm looking at you, Romantico, Sir

Tasty Maximilian, Yeah, that is his real name. We haven't talked about all the multi generational popularity cycle they experience either, or, as we like to call it, the rise and fall of the Brittney's and Ashley's. Check out the brain Stuff channel on YouTube, and for more on this and thousands of other topics, visit how stuff works dot com