The "Players whose names start with K tend to strikeout more" study, is, I believe, flawed. It's true that K names struck out more historically, but that's because K names (Kyle, Kevin, etc.) are much more common now, when strikeout rates are high, than they were in previous generations, when strikeout rates were low.
See:
http://sabermetricresearch.blogspot.com/2007/11/k-study-for-real_26.html
That's it, I'm naming my first child Utility.
A more useful application of this might be to assign people temporary names during hypothetical role playing to influence how they behave or what lessons they take away. I see this as a subtler version of what happened in the Stanford prison experiment. It would certainly reinforce the process: making someone a guard is one thing, what if they were given the a badge labeled "Lt. Punisher"?
Eliezer seems to be advocating not naming your child anything that might be in any way weird
I'm not sure avoiding mere weirdness is the point, the point is to avoid any name with associations or permutations that would make one's child easier to tease during childhood, or be taken less seriously during adulthood (e.g. "Candy"), or experience a higher risk of any other negative outcome.
As someone who has experienced childhood bullying, I'm glad that my name didn't give the bullies any additional ammo. If the bully is trying hard enough, they can make fun of just about any name, but some names are easier to make fun of than others.
The child having a positive outcome in the world (meaning the real world of the present, not the world that should be) is more important than parents' exercising their creativity, self-expression, or statement-making, political or otherwise. A child is not a vanity plate.
These studies have not held up well to further rigor. See Scott's 2016 post Devoodooifying Psychology, or even better Simonsohn's (2011) paper Spurious? Name similarity effects (implicit egotism) in marriage, job, and moving decisions.
A lot of relatively weighty decisions wind up being made for trivial reasons simply because all of the non-trivial factors cancel each other out - for instance, if I were trying to decide whether to go into ethics or metaphysics (a choice with long-term career impact, assuming I get to be a professor one day) and I didn't find myself strongly preferring one over the other, I could see myself picking one for a silly reason. If my name were Ethel, which it is not, and I liked the sound of "Ethel the ethicist", that might tip the balance. Either t...
But you've missed the most important point!
It means that the comic book tendency to get super-powers coincidentally related to your real name actually works!
Now if only I can figure out a superpower related to the name Jonnan, I can figure out what kind of radioactive bug to be bit by?
Jonnan
That is all quite fascinating, in a "fancy that!" fashion, but whenever I see correlational data reported I wonder about the magnitude of the effect, and a measure of that magnitude in terms of bits of information. The first result they report is that if there were no influence between name and state of residence, the proportion of coincidences would be 0.1664, while the observed level is 0.1986. How large an influence does this represent?
I am not quite sure what the correct calculation to make is -- perhaps someone more versed in these matters c...
Blog posts by Andrew Gelman:
Why it's not so weird that so many dentists are named Dennis: a story of conditional probability
How many people choose careers based on their names?
Is there a reason NOT to link to the posts directly and have the readers repeat the search?
More specifically, such a small effect does not require a widespread bias; if just a tiny number of people have a stronger (even conscious) bias, it could explain the data.
I live in the state of Georgia and recently I had noticed that I pay special attention to news stories about the country of Georgia. This happens despite that the country has no special relevance besides sharing a name with my state. This post gives me some insight as to why that happens.
This doesn't seem dissimilar to some experiences I had in elementary school. Whenever the teacher would read a story to the class, and a character had the same name as someone in the class, when the teacher read the name of that character, everyone in the class would look ...
Here's one way this could be explained: Susie realizes that her name could become a cheap and effective marketing tool if she sells seashells at the seashore. Since that's something she enjoys doing anyway, she does so.
If that's how things are, I wouldn't really call this a cognitive bias.
Is this whole bias caused by the exposure effect? Would there be any obstacle in unifying the two? Do people also prefer to live in towns that are associated with their parents' names? Do people who fall for this effect also name their pets or children after themselves to a greater extent?
I'd be interested to know if people who live in towns or have jobs that sound like their names enjoy these residences/careers more than people who live in the same town/have the same career, but have different-sounding names.
If you have any doubts about the validity of the research, I urge you to read the linked paper. It's a great example of researchers who go above and beyond the call of duty to eliminate as many confounders as possible.
I'd be more confident if there was any research by someone other than Pelman on the subject. There is always a possibility for biased selection of data and deceptive interpretation of analysis.
Data point:
U.S. Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote the majority opinion in Kennedy v. Louisiana, a highly controversial 2008 case striking down the death penalty for child rape.
In this 5-4 decision favoring a petitioner named Patrick Kennedy, Justice Kennedy, widely considered a "swing vote" with conservative leanings, sided with the liberals on the court and against the conservatives -- clearly determining the outcome of the case.
I put this here because this post was the first thing I thought of when I ran across this piece of informat...
Intriguing... I can imagine that having a certain name may have an effect on people (as illustrated by the late Johnny Cash), but this is weird... Couldn't there be some alternative explanation?
E.g., maybe there's a regional preference for certain names, and they picked the regional preferred ones that happened to fit the desired pattern (Study 1)? Similarly for study 7, where names are correlated with with social stratum, year of birth, which also influence occupation.
For some of the studies they picked very specific examples - hardware v.s. roofing or on...
Here's my take on why the name bias exists: the name bias is a byproduct of the consistency bias.
Like we all know, we are inclined to be consistent with our prior beliefs and actions. Another aspect our ourselves that we tend to want to be consistent with is our perceived identity. For instance, if you identify yourself as a manly man then you'll have a more natural affinity to things you perceive to be manly.
Obviously, your name plays a big role in the construction of your identity. Your tendency to prefer things that sound like your name is just your min...
This is hinted at in other comments, but is it established in the literature that this is a small, unconscious bias? It seems like it could just as easily be the conscious preferences of a few people. In accordance with what Alicorn says below, I wouldn't be surprised if a positive integer of people moved to Philadelphia to become "Philladelphia Phil" or something similar.
The full quote is even better:
"That's the way Max Power is, Marge. Decisive. Uncompromising! And rude!"
Just out of curiosity... Has there been any research on the opposite bias? Do people who dislike their names avoid places that sound similar to it?
Researching a sample of people who legally changed their names in adulthood might be the way to go here.
I think an examination of how different biases interact with self-esteem would be a profitable direction for future research
or, more generally, how "wanting to feel good about your life" causes people to be more biased.
I feel kind of embarrassed now for having not known about this bias until now. It doesn't really surprise me, though: all my life I've noticed that I tend to like things that start with the letters "g" and "w": fictional characters, place names, etc.. I've never really thought consciously "I like things that sound like my name", but looking at my actual preferences I think it's pretty clear that I do.
Great post. But I feel queasy about p-values because of Lindley's paradox: more often than not, a small p-value doesn't necessarily make a perfect Bayesian reject the null hypothesis. Oh, what to do.
...although in this situation I do accept the results.
It also tends to shut up people who don't believe there are subconscious influences on decision-making, and who are always willing to find some excuse for why a supposed "bias" could actually be an example of legitimate decision-making.
Sorry, not this time. I have no problem with preferring things that are associated with me.
Marge: You changed your name without consulting me?
Homer: That's the way Max Power is, Marge. Decisive.
--The Simpsons
In honor of Will Powers and his theories about self-control, today I would like to talk about my favorite bias ever, the name letter effect. The name letter effect doesn't cause global existential risk or stock market crashes, and it's pretty far down on the list of things to compensate for. But it's a good example of just how insidious biases can be and of the egoism that permeates every level of the mind.
The name letter effect is your subconscious preference for things that sound like your own name. This might be expected to mostly apply to small choices like product brand names, but it's been observed in choices of spouse, city of residence, and even career. Some evidence comes from Pelham et al's Why Susie Sells Seashells By The Seashore:
The paper's first few studies investigate the relationship between a person's name and where they live. People named Phil were found more frequently than usual in Philadelphia, people named Jack in Jacksonville, people named George in Georgia, and so on with p < .001. To eliminate the possibility of the familiarity effect causing parents to subconsciously name their children after their place of residence, further studies were done with surnames and with people who moved later in life, both with the same results. The results held across US and Canadian city names as well as US state names, and were significant both for first name and surname.
In case that wasn't implausible enough, the researchers also looked at association between birth date and city of residence: that is, were people born on 2/02 more likely to live in the town of Two Harbors, and 3/03 babies more likely to live in Three Forks? With p = .003, yes, they are.
The researchers then moved on to career choices. They combed the records of the American Dental Association and the American Bar association looking for people named either Dennis, Denice, Dena, Denver, et cetera, or Lawrence, Larry, Laura, Lauren, et cetera. That is: were there more dentists named Dennis and lawyers named Lawrence than vice versa? Of the various statistical analyses they performed, most said yes, some at < .001 level. Other studies determined that there was a suspicious surplus of geologists named Geoffrey, and that hardware store owners were more likely to have names starting with 'H' compared to roofing store owners, who were more likely to have names starting with 'R'.
Some other miscellaneous findings: people are more likely to donate to Presidential candidates whose names begin with the same letter as their own, people are more likely to marry spouses whose names begin with the same letter as their own, that women are more likely to show name preference effects than men (but why?), and that batters with names beginning in 'K' are more likely than others to strike out (strikeouts being symbolized by a 'K' on the records).
If you have any doubts about the validity of the research, I urge you to read the linked paper. It's a great example of researchers who go above and beyond the call of duty to eliminate as many confounders as possible.
The name letter effect is a great addition to any list of psychological curiosities, but it does have some more solid applications. I often use it as my first example when I'm introducing the idea of subconscious biases to people, because it's clear, surprising, and has major real-world effects. It also tends to shut up people who don't believe there are subconscious influences on decision-making, and who are always willing to find some excuse for why a supposed "bias" could actually be an example of legitimate decision-making.
And it introduces the concept of implicit egoism, the tendency to prefer something just because it's associated with you. It's one possible explanation for the endowment effect, and if it applies to my beliefs as strongly as to my personal details or my property, it's yet another mechanism by which opinions become calcified.
This is also an interesting window onto the complex and important world of self-esteem. Jones, Pelham et al suggest that the name preference effect is either involved in or a byproduct of some sort of self-esteem regulatory system. They find that name preferences are most common among high self-esteem people who have just experienced threats to their self-esteem, almost as if it is a reactive way of saying "No, you really are that great." I think an examination of how different biases interact with self-esteem would be a profitable direction for future research.