Can’t pick a winning name…

Every parent wants to have a positive influence on their child’s life and give them every advantage possible. On the first acts parents do for (or to) their child is give them a name, hoping it will lead them to success. In the book Freakonomics, the authors tell the story of Winner and Loser, sons of Robert Lane. Winner was first; Robert’s logic was simple: how can he fail with a name like that? Their seventh and last child was born a few years later and, for some reason, Robert thought Loser would be a good follow up to Winner.

So, if Winner was couldn’t fail, was it possible Loser to succeed? As it turned out, he did just that. Loser (or Lou to his colleagues) became a sergeant with the NYPD and Winner, well, he was not so successful with over dozens of violations on his criminal record from burglary to domestic violence and more.

On the other hand…

From the example above, it would seem that a name is a completely arbitrary thing. Yet, studies have been done and there’s even (gasp!) a theory out there: the Name-Letter Effect. In short, you are attracted to your own initials. For example, kids with names starting with A and B getting those grades in school while the same follows kids with C’s and D’s.

Using common sense

Here’s an observed and recorded phenomenon: Children who get good grades often share similar names. That means, there seemingly exist a whole series “smart” names. Would it be reasonable to assume that by giving our child a “smart” name, they would be smart?

Possibly, although more probably, he or she would just share a name with a lot of smart kids in school, but his or her grades would not match. Why? It’s an issue of correlation vs cause-effect.

Correlation is when there exists a relationship between two occurrence but there is no evidence that they influence one another. For example, there’s a correlation between the rise in the murder rate and ice cream consumption in New York City. That is, when the ice cream consumption goes up in NYC, people die.

Cause-effect is taking two occurrences and claiming that they influence each other. Taking the NYC example, the factors influencing both of these is a rise in temperature. So a heat wave will cause people to not only eat ice cream, but to get a little unhinged and violent.

Getting back to names, giving a kid a “smart name” is like trying to fight murder in NYC by outlawing ice cream. So what’s the cause-effect relationship between smart kids and “smart names”? Parents with similar demographics, especially in terms of education, who have similar taste in names. In other words, smart kids have smart parents; smart parents share similar tastes with other smart parents; a smart parent is more likely to name their child the same as other smart parents; so, smart kids tend to have similar names. It’s not the name that makes them smart, it’s the fact that their parents are smart that makes them smart.

How a name can lead to failure

Names are mirrors of society. Just as smart parents give their children “smart names”, low-income parents give “low-income names” as is true with Catholic, Chinese, Hispanic, or Hindi. Because a name is a reflection of who your parents were, this allows for discrimination.

One good example is a study was done among employers and potential employees. Reporters took the resumes of several African Americans and changed only the names to more “White names”. You can guess the result: When employers were offered two virtually identical resumes, one with a “Black name” and the other with a “White Name”, there was a tendency toward the “White” candidate getting invited for an interview over the “Black” one.

Questions to the Readers

Do you think that names have any effect on the future of your child?
What do you think about the Letter-Effect Theory?
What was your reaction to the test with Black vs White resumes?

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