Kieran Healy points to Robin Mahfood, the CEO of the charity Food for the Poor. This really is pretty impressive: you see a lot of good first-name or last-name matches but not so many where the entire name forms a … Continue reading →

Devah Pager points me to this article by Uri Simonsohn, which begins: Three articles published [by Brett Pelham et al.] have shown that a disproportionate share of people choose spouses, places to live, and occupations with names similar to their … Continue reading →

Susan referred me to an article by Brett Pelham, Matthew Mirenberg, and John Jones, called “Why Susie sells seashells by the seashore: implicit egotism and major life decisions.” Here’s the abstract of the paper:

Because most people possess positive associations about themselves, most people prefer things that are
connected to the self (e.g., the letters in one’s name). The authors refer to such preferences as implicit
egotism. Ten studies assessed the role of implicit egotism in 2 major life decisions: where people choose
to live and what people choose to do for a living. Studies 1–5 showed that people are disproportionately
likely to live in places whose names resemble their own first or last names (e.g., people named Louis are
disproportionately likely to live in St. Louis). Study 6 extended this finding to birthday number
preferences. People were disproportionately likely to live in cities whose names began with their birthday
numbers (e.g., Two Harbors, MN). Studies 7–10 suggested that people disproportionately choose careers
whose labels resemble their names (e.g., people named Dennis or Denise are overrepresented among
dentists). Implicit egotism appears to influence major life decisions. This idea stands in sharp contrast to
many models of rational choice and attests to the importance of understanding implicit beliefs.

First off, I’m impressed that they did 10 different studies. Psychologists really take their work seriously! Lots of interesting tidbits (see end of this entry for a few).

Some order-of-magnitude calculations

I’d like now to take the next step and estimate the prevalence of this ego-naming phenomenon. Here are the data for female and male dentists and lawyers (for each category, the count (with expected counts, based on independence of the 2-way table, in parentheses):

Of the 1576 men in the study with names beginning with “Den,” an extra 17.3 (that’s 247-229.7) became dentists. That would suggest that the name effect changed the career decisions of 17.3/1576=1.1% of these “Den” guys. But that’s an overestimate, since the denominator should be much larger–it should be all the “Den” guys, not just the dentists and lawyers.

According to the article, 0.415% of Americans in 1990 were named Dennis. Multiplying by approx 150 million in the labor force yields 620,000 Dennises. Pelham et al. report, “Taken together, the names Jerry and Walter have an average frequency of 0.416%, compared with a frequency of 0.415% for the name Dennis. Thus, if people named Dennis are more likely than people named Jerry or Walter to work as dentists, this would suggest that people named Dennis do, in fact, gravitate toward dentistry. A nationwide search focusing on each of these specific first names revealed 482 dentists named Dennis, 257 dentists named Walter, and 270 dentists named Jerry.” If we assume that 482-(257+270)/2=221 of these Dennises are “extra” dentists–choosing the profession just based on their name–that gives 221/620000= .035% of Dennises choosing their career using this rule.

How to estimate a total effect?

It’s an interesting example of conditional probability. If we accept the basic results of the study–the authors are pretty thorough at handing potential objections–if you meet a dentist named Dennis, it’s quite likely that he picked the profession because of his name. But, an extremely low proportion of Dennises pick a career based on the name.

But, then again, there are other D careers. Presumably there are first-letter effects which are weaker than first-3-letter effects, but are still there. So, Dennises could also become doctors, dogcatchers, etc. It would be interesting to set up a simple model and try to estimate the total effect.

OK, now some more cool results from the Pelham et al. paper: Continue reading →

Dear Editors, Ian Frazier (“Snook,” October 30th) writes, “you will find suprisingly often that people take up professions suggested by their last names.” In an article called “Why Susie sells seashells by the seashore: implicit egotism and major life decisions,” … Continue reading →

Zach Shahn writes: After watching Tennys Sandgren play in the Australian Open quarterfinals last night, I think it might be time to accept that the dentists named Dennis people were onto something. Looking him up revealed that he was named … Continue reading →