What does the Madoff scandal tell us about the names we should give our children?

A facinating post from a good friend and clever guy, Steve Martin of the Science of Yes

Any high profile scandal will raise questions and when that scandal concerns a sum of money so large as to be almost unimaginable the questions come thick and fast.

Two questions that are unlikely to be asked though are ‘Why did no one predict that the ironically named Bernie Madoff would in fact make off with all the cash?’ and “What has this to do with the names we give our children?”

The idea that a person’s name can influence their choices in life appears ridiculous, at best coincidental but research actually exists suggesting that such ideas have a basis in reality.

The New Scientist has even given this phenomenon a name - nominative determism. Here are a few examples.

In 1977 two urologists published a paper about incontinence in the British Journal of Urology. Their names were Dr. Splatt and Dr. Weedon.

Frank Turner, the CEO of fast food giant McDonalds is married to a woman called Patty.

Theodore Hee (Mr. T. Hee) was one of the early storyline writers for Disney cartoons.

In Yes! 50 Secrets from the Science of Persuasion we describe a study conducted by social scientist Bruce Pelham who believed that a person’s name could indeed influence their career choices. He started the study by coming up with a list of names that sounded like the word dentist, such as Dennis. According to US Census data, Dennis was the 40^th most frequent male first name in the population at the time. The names Jerry and Walter ranked 39^th and 41^st respectively.

Armed with this information, Pelham then searched the national directory of the American Dental Association, examining the number of dentists with one of those three first names. If people’s names have no effect whatsoever on what career path they follow, you’d expect that there should roughly be equal numbers of people with these three names going into the field of dentistry. But that’s not what he found. The nationwide search revealed that 257 dentists were named Walter, 270 were named Jerry, and 482 were named Dennis. That means that dentists are about 82% more likely to be named Dennis than what you’d expect if nominative determism had no effect on career choice.

Perhaps if you are struggling to find a dentist in your area you may wish to blame in part the parents who decided not to call one of their children Dennis a few years back.

Quirky as such a study may be what could there be potential implications of nominative determism? For example could there be a potential shortage of future professionals such as doctors, engineers and scientists simply because we are not giving our children names that have some link with a desired career path and occupation?

Well hello again!