A Boy Named Sue

it's all about associations, right, That is good? That is good. Yeah, there are so many associations with names. There's family history. Names are both so simple and too simple and then just overly complicated the more you look at it. And could they possibly be so freighted with meaning that they come to actually form who we are? Yeah, that's the thing. The name that you're given is the name the secret

ruler of your life? Did that determine everything in your life from the cradle to the grave, all because your your your mother and father decided to name you. Say say Sue, I was about to say. Johnt Cash had an idea about this long before researchers started to say what are the cognitive effects of naming children? Or rather, Shell Silverstein did, oh yeah, yeah, he wrote the lyrics to that song, or rather that was his poem that became the Johnny Cash song. I did not know that.

That makes it even better, Shall I go for it? Yeah? My daughter left home one hours three and he didn't leave much to moll and me, just this old guitar and empty pol labooze. Now, I don't blame him close he running hit. But the meanest thing he ever did was before he left, he went and named miss Sue. And then, of course the song goes on and on to detail his life as a boy named Sue. It's a rough life, it's a hard life. But eventually he confronts his father. He says, yeah, he's pretty much like

why did you do that? And his dad's like, well, I know it's a rough life, and I thought you had to be tough, so of course I named you sous that you'd have like a banackbone. And that's how much I love you, because I knew I wasn't gonna be there. Yeah, he's saying, I essentially put a target on your head. Because I knew that either everyone around you would destroy you or and what did you know his Nieji says, what doesn't destroy me makes me stronger.

So um, that was the whole, the whole idea here, that's what Shell Silverstein was going for a little Niegi. Yeah. Yeah, and I can't help. But I mean we've both been through the naming process for a child at this point. Did you have any names that you ended up rejecting? Um, well, yeah, but but obviously I liked them, they were on my list, you know. But um, but my grandmother used to to ask every day like what are you gonna name or what are you gonna name her? And I would just

come up with ridiculous names to annoy her. Garlic sorbet toad stool ivory nice, a period person a person you. Oh yeah, I had a short list of Sagan okay, that was a strong contender, a tray um Zevon, Shoehorn, Quantis, ny are leptap yasav Off. But they got just going

with Sebastian instead, which is great. I love that name. Um. But yeah, this is just becomes a really important thing, that's naming of the child, and in fact it's so important that you know, people published tons of books about it, like name giving Advice, and there was even a two thousand and ten British study of three thousand parents that revealed that one in five parents regret the name that

they chose for their child. So it would make sense that a parenting website like I don't know baby Center would be so um well visited by parents to see what are the most popular names for boys and girls. But also they put out information like what are the weirdest names? And in two thousand and thirteen they have some real hunting urs. Yeah. Um, there were at least three baby boys named Cheese yes, which which is nice. Um. I believe there was a character on the wire named Cheese. Yeah,

there was. I have to point out at this point there was also a child named Danish, and I was really hoping that, like, yeah, that they were twins like Cheese in Danish, but I don't think that was the case, Little Cheese. Uh. And then some of the other names Panda, yeah, Rocket, which is you know, you want an explosive child, it's just gonna get out there in the world. I have

a rocket in my neighborhood. He's great. Yeah, and when in doubt, you know, in terms of coming with a name for your child, just name them after a primordial sea monster that that that rise in the prehistoric darkness and h and rivals the might of an ancient Hebrew deity. I just name your kid Leviathan, which somebody did. I mean, there's there's no weight there, There's there's there's nothing there that would make that job feel sort of bogged down

to the phil his or her destiny. Um, there's also Drago and bullet. So all of this kind of whirligig naming here made us wonder how does this play out in something called nominative determinism. Yeah, this is basically the idea that we're talking about here, except with science behind it. The idea that any name, yeah name, the name that we're given determines who we are, how we behave, and how the world's gonna treat us, how the world's gonna

perceive us. That it really gets down into the complexity of language, right. We we end up acquiring language, building language, using languages, an operating system for the human brain, and the system that we based all of our culture on. And what I was really struck with in researching this topic. Is that UM is that nominative determinism is kind of it's almost like a mistake in the programming or a side effect of the programming that the name that you

give an individual carries a lot of obvious weight. You know, if you name your your kid after a mythological hero, you're obviously drawing upon that you can call your kid thor is a certain thoroughness um that you're you're dragging in there. But then there's a lot of stuff that's

happening at a subconscious level. It's just uh, you know, tendrils reaching out through the canvas of language, as do you mean, like the symbol wasn't necessarily meant to be internalized, but it's so easy for our brains to make that little walk over there. And we talked about this kind of in the last episode, about how if you have a limb that's next to your limb, and you begin to see it from your first person perspective, then you sort of adopt that limb as your own, and all

of a sudden you have three limbs. Um And we won't go into that, but the point is is that it's really easy to sort of take these things on as yourself, and that is at the heart of nominative determinism. And I wanted to read this little bit from a Mental Plus article on the topic. Quote Dr rich Dick chop Is in Austin, you're erologist. He was known for performing best ectomies. Really other doctors at the same urology clinic include Dr Hardeman and Dr Wang. Is this coincidence?

Probably um, but there may be something there. That's that's why we're discussing it obviously. Well, in my experience, I am My father was a dentist, so I've always from a very little kid, I would always noticed the signs for dentist offices anywhere we went. And even then I remember thinking, there are a lot of dentists who have the last name Pain P A y. And even why, like, wouldn't you want to change that? Do you really want to be Dr? Pain when people go to get their

teeth worked on? And I did a quick Google search before we came to the podcast Camber and and just page after page of of of dentist named Pain, and it it makes you think again, are they are they drawn to dentistry somehow subconsciously because of that name or and then why maybe not change it if you're going to make a go out of business, because you wouldn't you wouldn't hesitate to change the name of the business off if the business name were somehow a counterpoint to

what you're trying to the experience that you're trying to sell to the customer. So so it seems like you would you would want to do that with your your professional name as well. I don't know, I'm about to tell you something that I think might end up in an awkward silence moment. Uh my gas Row anthrologist. His

name is doctor Sunshine, And I'm not kidding. Yeah, So I think on that a moment, And then let's sort of switch gears here back to a boy named Sue, because apparently if you're a boy named Ashley or Shannon Um, there are some things that will be needed out to

you because of having that name. In fact, research psychologist David Figlio of Northwestern University in Illinois looked at millions of birth certificates and then he broke them down by phonemics and behavior, and he found a bunch of different things, not just about Ashley and Shannon Um, but in terms of those names. He did to find that the boys with names traditionally given to girls are more likely to misbehave than their counterparts with masculine names, which is interesting

because it lines up with the song. Right, boy named Sue winds up getting a lot of fights as an embattled life that makes him tougher. Uh, they found it up into a certain age. I think it was like age six. I think sixth grade. Sixth grade rather up. Unto a certain point, it didn't really make any difference. But then sixth grade hits and and so that's when the embattlement begins to really take hold. Suddenly, these these male individuals with feminine names are misbehaving and acting out

all the time. Yeah, gender norms are in full force, right, and so you have kids who are are really trying to reinforce that idea and to make things worse. And I think this will be obvious if there happened to be a girl with the name of Shannon or Ashley in the same class as that boy, exactly, because there you have confirmation that you have a feminine because that

kid is right there with it. Now. As a side note, I wondered to what extent this phenomenon might disappear as hopefully culture becomes increasingly sensitive to the the idea of gender and that gender is not an issue of one fortress and another fortress. Or does that even trickle down to kids or kids always going to be boys versus girls. I think it takes a while, because I try with my own daughter to try to live in a not a gender free world, but to not make that as

as the starting point for for conversations or decisions. But I do see her teachers maybe unconsciously putting that dynamic in play and really talking a lot about boys and girls and the girls are lovely, and the boys are handsome, and the girls are well behaved, and that so on

and so forth, and spice and everything nice exactly. Yeah, And and to that point, Um, I didn't want to point out that David Biglio found that girls with names that are relatively feminine in high school choose advanced coursework and humanities and less feminine names, Um they are given to girls, those girls are more likely to choose math

and science courses. Interesting. So here's an idea, and one that I am really having trouble by, the idea that a name could not only determine how the society will view you and how your view your own place in society. But could a name actually make you more prone to disease or make you more unhealthy? Mm? I know you're talking about You're talking about the Brady Bunch study that they called the Brake I don't think they call it a pretty much study. But it was a study about

people with a surname of Brady. This is in Doublin right researchers in Dublin. They wanted to discover whether or not a person's name might influence their health, and so they looked at whether people with his surname Brady had a higher incidence of Brady cardia that is a slow heart rate. How did they get funding for this? This just sounds in aimed to me, where someone and as we'll see, the research is really fat. I mean they

find it's really fascinating. But who said I wonder if people with the name Brady are more likely to suffer from Brady Brady cardia. Like it's almost to propose that question, you have to feel like the answer might be yes. Yeah. I also kind of wondered to what degree were people familiar with the term Brady cardia and knew about it and maybe internalized it because that's the idea, right. Yeah, I was not familiar with the term, so it didn't

play into my view of the Brady punch. YEA. Researchers used data from a hospital database and the percentage of the population of surname Brady, of course, and they determined through use of online telephone listenings in Dublin between two thousand and seven and two thousand and thirteen that they were something like five dred seventy nine Bradies listed in total and one thousand and twelve pacemakers fitted during this time, and the median age of the patients seventy seven years old,

and the proportion of pacemaker recipients among Brady's one point three was significantly higher than among non Brady's point six one. Okay, so there's something there. It's not huge. I mean, we're not saying, well, what a huge this. This completely says that this is going on, right. It's like a number of the things that we're talking about here, a number of the examples rather on an individual basis, you're just looking around at the people, you know it, there's a

good chance it's not going to line up. But when you look at larger population groups and larger sample groups, that's where you begin to see these interesting statistics to uh, you know emerging. Yeah, and they did say in the study, hey, there are limitations to this. We don't know that the patient's background. We don't know if they were related and they had genetic predispositions, and this could have skewed results.

We also don't know whether or not because this is a city center for um, this procedure that drew more bradyes and so that kind skew the results as well. So, um, you know, it's just kind of an interesting thing that's put out there. You know, you begin to wonder, should I name Mike, you know, just be on the safe side, I'll just go ahead and name my kid Methuselah or you know, just to ensure that they have a long life. But then, in my tempting fate, what happens when a

kid named Methusela dies at age fifty? Then you're gonna feel really like I did that by giving him this name and trying to force the universe to make them live a really long time. I think it's okay. I think that sometimes kids will buck against their names. And um, this was actually in one of the articles that we read. Um, I'll have to look at it in a moment and

bring up the title. But the article was saying that there was a father who named his kid loser lane and then purpose or was this one of those incidents where they thought it would be pronounced differently? Well you decided after tell you the next kid's name, Winner Lane. Okay, Loser ends up to be like an upstanding citizen. I don't think he's a cop or something, but I mean he's done well for himself. Winner turns out to be like in the Pokey all the time. His crime written

What kind of father was this is? I'm just imagining it means it was like a B. F. Skinner type of ploy here. Well, did you hear about the sociologist who wrote Parentology. He named his children their first names, his daughter's e and then his other son or his son is yo, and then beyond like the first names, they have a million other names tacked onto it. And then they are not of Asian descent, But he decided to throw in some Asian names in there, just to

kind of throw off the paradigm. He says of immigrants taking on um that country's name messed with the paradigm there um. Anyway, there was an interview with his kids, and his kids are like, yeah, we're fine with it, but yes, sometimes they're sociologists who unleash some experiments at home. Yeah, now, of course there's well this is we'll discuss this some more as well. But of course any name you give somebody who does not exist in a vacuum, there are

plenty of other factors at play. We're gonna take a break, and when we come back, this will come directly into play. All Right, we're back. We're going to talk a little bit about fre Economics, because this is a book if you're not familiar with it, that sort of takes this um socio economic view of things that we don't normally apply that sort of lens to and tries to figure out if there's some sort of algorithm that is driving

our behavior and the things that we do. And of course naming came up in Fre Economics, um Steve Levitt, the author of Economics and Harvard Economics Roland G. Friar. They wanted to see if the trend of black parents naming their children distinctly non white names. They wanted to see if this had an impact on those kids later

on socially and comically. Yeah. So what Friar did is he looked at birth certificate information for every child born in California since nineteen sixty one and uh and what he found uh initially matches up pretty well with with I think everyone's experience of names. Up until the early seventies, there was a more overlap in white black names. But then by nineteen eighty you see an explosion of distinctly

black names. Uh. And some of the fuel for this, uh you can find in the Black power movement and the push to accentuate African culture and African roots and uh. And so you see this this divide. So suddenly you see more distinctly black names, increasing number of distinctly black names in the black community. So Friar found that the data showed that on average, person with a distinctly black name had a worse life outcome than an individual with

a more common name. Now, it's important to note, and the authors of economic note that it's not the fault of their names. Okay, it has to do with the parents who select a particular sort of name. So again, like I said earlier, names don't exist in a vacuum. Names are coming from parents. And so you see trends where certain names are more likely to be bestowed by members of various levels of the socio economic scale. And and and this this is in the data that they discussing.

Fre economics concerns more than just the white black divide, but also uh, the economic divide. What names are more common among lower income households versus higher income households. So we already know that there are unconscious associations. There's just all sorts of biases here. Yeah, not not to mean not to count out just overt bias and racism exactly. Yeah, so this is really interesting. Um Latonia Russell, Harvard Professor

of Government Technology. She published a study about search results in Google related to name searches and racial profiling in

in the ad works for Good Well. And she did this after a search for her name served up an AD next to her name with find an arrest record and it was actually a colleague of hers um who was not black, who they were searching something about some of the work that they were doing and student in the search they were of course looking for their names to see how that would come up, and he was the first person to tag like, oh, that's weird. Mine doesn't come up with this arrest record ad over here,

but yours does. And so he started to do a couple of different searches and came up with the idea of I think it's kind of tied to black sounding names, and she was appalled. She said, no, no no, no, no, I'm a scientist here. I'm going to conduct a formal um study of this, and I'm going to prove you wrong, because she didn't want to believe that that was actually

like regional profiling was happening in the ad words. And she found that a black identified name was twenty more likely than a white identified name to get an add suggestive of an arrest record, huh, which is troublesome because you see that and it does have this sort of association of like, well, perhaps this person does have an arrest record, right, and then that's just more fire to just sort of the subliminal messaging that's coming at you

through your your search engine, through one of the ways that you're interacting with the world, and so at least subliminally your search engine is saying, hey, you're the type of person who might be arrested, and then you're going to absorb that information and have to deal with And as David Eagleman might say, the problem with us is that all of this is happening under the cover of unconscious.

Right You're unconscious is meeting all of this out and serving it up to your conscious as this idea, and you don't even know what's going on. And he calls this implicit bias. This implicit bias is within us. We're not aware of it. It's it's acting um sort of

independently to our consciousness. And he said that this is borne out in reaction time and hesitations during computer models that allow us to like or dislike images or words to show how we're driven by our unconscious and he gives a couple of examples of this, but the one that I like best is um this one that begins with a screen that has like and dislike at the top of the screen, and then in the middle there

is a name that appears. So he says, like you could have the name of a religion appearing in the middle, And he said, what's interesting about this is not just the speed of the participants selecting like or dislike, but that this program actually tracks the trajectory of the mouse movements and it can show the drift. So it shows like, maybe you're going toward no, and then you correct yourself and go to um or not no, maybe you're going towards dislike, and then you correct yourself and go toward

like UM. And he's saying that that is showing that you're you're doing the more social appropriate response. Your conscious is catching up to your unconscious and correcting it. So he's saying that even people with certainty about their attitudes and beliefs um, they can find themselves surprised and sometimes appalled by what's lurking within their brains that they're not even aware of. So it's it's like the gut reaction

versus the actual conscious thought reaction. Sort of if someone were to say, offer someone a beer for lunch at work, their gut instinct might be might be to say yes, I would like a beer, and then they're they're conscious reaction might be no, I don't drink beer at work, or no, I don't drink beer at all. Why would I even entertain the idea? But for that split second you do yeah, your hand might start to reach out

and you're like, oh no, no no, no thanks yeah. Um. So that gets us into this idea of implicit association, because that's where we get into this idea of unconscious commonality. So, you know, here's a good example that I think we've talked about before. If your name is Dennis or Dinny, there's some data out there, and Eagleman talks about this in his book that you perhaps could become a dentist. You're internalizing this association between the way that your your

name sounds in this profession. Yeah, people Denise or Dennis more are disproportionately more likely to become dentist, Laura Lawrence more likely to become a lawyer, George or Georgiana more likely to become a geologist. Uh. And it's it's interesting. My my birth name is of course Padrick, so that and that is why I became a podcaster. I guess, ha ha ha, very nice, Um, Padrick. You know what that Nay show up in is like one of the most popular baby names really just because of the Game

of Thrones. Now we're just thinking because of the Profession podcast, because everybody will be everybody wants their kid to be a podcaster because that's where the money is, alright. So another layer of this is something called implicit ego. And so that's that not just that unconscious connection that you have like oh someone is like me or that's like me, but actually feeling like, you know, like your ego is bound up in this idea of that thing or that person.

And we do a lot of this. We've talked about this before, when we attach our ego to something. It might be a sports team, yea, or or it might just be uh, it might be an individual, it might be a cup of tea. All right. So here's a nice example. Eagleman says that when students read an essay by Resputant in this example, uh, they also read a bit of biographical detail about Resputing, including his birthday, which by the way, was manipulated in the text to be

the same as the readers. So when they read that and that little the little data bit, that student gave Resputing a more generous rating. Yeah, that's really interesting. It's just just the mere insertion of that date given it gives you the subconscious link with this individual, and so you feel like a little more than usual, like Gregory Resputant is, uh, he's like you, He's is one of me.

I I I agree with everything he did to some extent. Yeah, and then on another level, it's like, yeah, go January seven, the team January seven, all of us who were born into there, your your winner. Oh man. I actually experienced this quiet a lot when I'm taking the train to work, because I take the westbound train and then I take

the North Brown train. When I'm waiting on the North Brown trained air to northbound trains, one is the Doorville train, one is the North Springs Only the North Springs train actually will get me all the way to work. And so I'll find myself, uh, standing there the Doorville train arrives, the wrong train arrives, and people are getting on board, and I'll actually think to myself, all those Doorville train people, they're the worst, just judging on the hardcore, even though

there's there's like one. And then I asked me, why am I doing that? Why am I attaching my ego to the to the North Springs train and judging everyone who rides the Doorville train. Star Billy Sneeches my friend exactly. Dr SEUs shows up again in the podcast, so you know, you also have priming going on too. Some of it's unconscious, some of it's not so unconscious. I was thinking about Alison louder Milk because she shared with me that she

this is actually implicit ego and priming. She shared with me that she buys Almond milk because she really enjoys the layout, the graphic layout of Almond milk, and it also kind of reminds her of her name, Alison louder Milk Almond Milk. Interesting. That was because this is another study that David Equlman brings up where they they had consumers test subjects um consider different brands of fictional teas, and they were more likely to go with the fictional

tea that contained the first three letters of their first name. So, I mean, this is why, of course I like Robina tea and you like Juilliard Tea. Yes, I love Juilliard Tea. Yeah no, I don't think they're all their real tees. But but but the idea is that we would be drawn to those brands in theory because they contain bits of our name and in a sense are a bit of us. Gosh, don't you just feel like such a

simple ton. Sometimes that's the kind of stuff that gives you like sometimes like a glorious being in the universe taking in all the wonderments of life. And then sometimes you're like cash, we're just such simpletons, just you know, being manipulated left and right. Were not even knowing it. Well, because so much of our experience of the world, understanding of in our culture is based in language, and again this kind of these kind of free associations, it's it's

kind of a flaw in the system. You're just kind of a side effect of this system being in place. Well, I will tell you, um, having done the research on this, I have decided that if I do have another child, I know the exact perfect name to give that child. Oh let's hear it. Okay, nominative determinism okay, or in D yeah yeah, or your namdi yeah, nam D. That's

a pretty good one. Pretty good. Yeah. I mean, don't you think like that they'd have to explain that name over and over again, and they'd be super aware of everything they did, everything that they perceived, and they would just be really over analytical and perhaps even in a fetal position as a result, And that idea to change it eventially too, because didn't Moon the unit Zappa. Did she change it? Seems like I thought she might have changed. Maybe she just goes by Moon. Maybe I don't know.

I feel like, if you're a Zappa kid, you just roll with it. Probably, But I have her tales of children with sort of hippie dream child names changing them to more socially normal acceptable names, because again that comes back to just the whole idea of the name is so weird, because like, I have a really normal name, Robert Lamb. There's nothing phenomenal about it except that the last name inspires the image of an animal and forces

children to make buying noises actually throughout school. But for the most part, it's a normal name. So I've never really felt a particular attachment to it. I've never hated it, but I'm just kind of like, oh, I guess I'm Robert Lamb. But so it made me want to give my son a name that really stood out and was amazing. But then, as we've discussed here, that's not necessarily the way to go well, and that's what some of this, uh, some of the articles that we read sort of touched on.

When you look at a name. Essentially, it is it is sort of all the hopes and fears that a parent puts into that name for the child. So it kind of makes sense that, you know, people would name their children, uh more normal names if they really thought that was important that you assimilate to society, or a unique name, if they really thought that individualism was very important. So you can kind of see all of that at plane. It's fascinating. Yeah, and I guess that's where middle names

are nice. You can throw a little something in there so that they can eventually choose. Do they want to go by the first name, they want to go by the middle name, do they want to go with initials? Give them some this is my take on the matter. Anyway, give them some options so that they can change their identity around in a way that that suits their needs

at the time. Because inevitably, children are going to go through periods where they're going to really want to assimilate, where assimilation is part of their genetic mission to blend in so that they can actually survive long enough to breed. Uh. But then on the other hand, they're going to reach a point inevitably or hopefully inevitably where they want to stand out where they want to be their own person and be unique. All right, So there you go a little,

a little insight into the naming process. All of you have names, and if and if you don't have a name, actually that's even more amazing. Is that even possible? Can you not name? I don't think so to name somebody just a blank, you know, just an absence of name and that becomes the name whoa And how emotionally saddled would you be with the absence of a being, of a name of a sound. Right, I was about to wrap that up with a being with a name with

a sound. But in round. So all of you have names, A number of you have have engaged in the naming process. So we'd love to hear from everyone. How have you grown up with your name? How is it affected your out come in life? What kind of thought did you put into naming your child? If you happen to have one of those, let us know. We would love to hear from. You can find us in all the normal places. The mothership is of course stuff to blow your mind

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