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.
My previous post acknowledges that a child could grow up and love the radical name they are given. And I already tried to address your point above with what I was saying about radical names causing a higher variance of outcome, meaning higher chances of positive results and higher chances of negative results. I'm just not much of a fan of high-risk, high-reward strategies in the domain of parenting.
Don't forget that elementary school children have older siblings, and that many schools are K-8. While the chances probably aren't very high, the consequences for the kid will be very high if someone finds out. Why play Russian Roulette with a child's social development?
Very well, I concede this point. I still see the costs of additional exposure to bullying to outweigh the cost of this sort of enforcement. Bullies will enforce a lot more than this on a kid who gets in their sights.
I agree that kids learn by example, but choice in the child's name is merely one form of the parents' self-expression. I'm sure there are plenty of other ways that parents can set nonconformist examples. See my previous comment about taking kids to rallies.
On the contrary, I did address this comparison when I said "Parents have valid interests in marrying the person they love, in raising their children to share their religion and diet, and in choosing their children's clothes and TV time. These concerns justify increasing the risk of their children getting teased, while the parents' mere self-expression does not."
I think you are correct to be hesitant in expecting that authorities would easily deal with bullying towards a child of yours. In my case, authorities were able to stop the more physical bullying, but they were able to stop the verbal aspect for any length of time.
I don't think I suggested that I think your children would be exposed to bullying in the home, nor all over the place. To clarify, I am suggesting that if a child is getting bullied somewhere, it's not guaranteed that the child will speak up about it to their parents or to the authorities. There are many possible reasons: not wanting to make trouble, not wanting to be a tattle-tale, fear of reprisal, not wanting to look weak, speaking up in the past changed nothing, or being accustomed to the treatment.
It is not at all uncommon for abuse victims to suffer in silence. How likely this would be for a child of yours would depend mainly on the nature and degree of bullying, and the child's personality. Even though the majority of children do not receive this treatment, putting a child at a greater risk of it, or exacerbating that treatment if it is already happening, is sufficiently bad that it should be taken seriously. Just because there is a low chance of a certain bad outcome, that doesn't mean that we shouldn't try to avoid that outcome if the badness is bad enough (see my Russian Roulette analogy above). In your case, if you had children with Asperger's syndrome or Aspie traits, you would probably want to do as much as possible to protect them from bullying (which might be why you are considering homeschooling).
Again, since you haven't experienced extensive bullying, and you don't understand the potential difficulties with speaking up, you seem to be underestimating how bad bullying can get and how difficult it can be for both the authorities and the person involved to deal with it. I think if you had a more accurate picture of the risks involved, and how big the stakes are, parent's name desires would start to shrink in importance relative to protecting children from those risks (which may not be common, but which are severe), and you would be a bit more hesitant towards parents exposing their children to a greater risk of bullying.
Continuum, yes, but this continuum doesn't increase linearly. There are both quantitative and qualitative differences between the teasing that certain types of names may inspire. There is a massive different between the amount and type of teasing that a name like Cimorene would inspire, as opposed to Vanyel, because the latter will cause gay-baiting if its meaning is discovered. I'm not confident that merely unusual names taken from fantasy novels will lead to enough additional teasing to worry about. It's mainly names with associations or permutations that can be used in a demeaning way that I think parents should be cautious about. Vanyel associates a child with homosexuality, which is truly a scarlet letter for a young boy.
As names increase in teasibility, or types of teasibiity, I'm not sure exactly where parents should become worried, but some names definitely do cross that line, such as ones that inspire gay-baiting.
First, I haven't thought this through to point where I'm saying that parents are "obliged" to do anything. What I'm advocating is that when thinking up a name for their child, they should consider the consequences of that name, and the probability, goodness, and badness of those potential consequences. I suggest that if parents come up with a name, they think about whether that name might increase their child's exposure to bullying and teasing (which is potentially difficult to avoid, and difficult to stop once it starts), and if so, they ask themselves whether their need for self-expression and belief that the child will like that name really justifies putting their child at an additional risk.
Last names are a slightly different case, because changing them usually has additional consequences that will have to be weighed. If the situation is choosing between the last names of two spouses for the child, then the parents should indeed consider the impact of last names on the child. In this case, I do think that Johnson is safer than Cox.
Btw, is there any (first) name for a child that you would think is morally questionable for parents to stick on a child, or at least inadvisable? For instance, would you see a problem with parents naming a boy GayWussyPoopooBaby? If so, why?
I think I have, if you read that quote of mine again. I said "Parents have valid interests in marrying the person they love," not "Parents have valid interests in marrying a person they love." I do not consider potential spouses to be completely interchangeable. Conseque... (read more)