Parents, Beware
Parents often agonize over what names they give their children; they may be trying to spare their child from cruel schoolyard rhymes or attempting to connect their being to a meaningful symbol or place.
But a new video is bringing to light key research which indicates that the names we are given at birth can actually have even more long-term affects on our lives than you may think – from our choice of profession to where we end up in the world. In fact, this research even suggests that we may not have much real control over our own life decisions at all.
According to studies compiled for the latest edition of PBS Digital Studios’ BrainCraft series, the act of writing our names over and over again throughout our lives can result in something called implicit egotism – a kind of obsession with the letters and sounds involved in our own names .
‘The more we are merely exposed to something, like those letters, the more we like them,’ explains BrainCraft host Vanessa Hill in the video.
This means that we may be more attracted to places, careers and even people that have a link to the letters used in our names. The study BrainCraft cites in its video – authored by researchers Polman, Pollmann and Poehlman, of course – calls this idea the name-letter effect.
In the study, researchers found that working in a group of people who share your initials actually raises the quality of your group work – no matter what Keeping Up With the Kardashians might suggest.
The name-letter effect can also influence how people name their businesses, and even their babies.
For example, St Louis was found to have an unusually high amount of people named Louis, Philadelphia had more Philips and Virginia Beach had more Virginias.
Part of this is due to the attraction people may have to place names similar to their own names, but researchers also argue that the high number of people with name-locale connections could be related to people in the areas giving their children names close to home because they ‘may simply be more accessible’.
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