Does your name influence your choice of career? The following paragraph caught my eye, from a NY Times story on testing the safety of motorcycle helmets.
"Hugh H. Hurt, a researcher who developed the Head Protection Research Laboratory at the University of Southern California, and author of the Hurt Report, a seminal study of motorcycle crashes, calls the current Snell M2005 standard “a little bit excessive.” "
Sunday, September 27, 2009
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3 comments:
Actually, the effect has some empirical evidence behind it. The most popular study (as far as I know) shows that people named Dennis are disproportionately likely to be come dentists, for example. You can see a story about it here:
http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/book_extracts/article2804926.ece
"Nominative determinism" is the "New Scientist" name for this phenomenon.
This idea has been studies quite a lot.
Refered to somtimes as implicit egotism, here is a research paper on this effect. www.stat.columbia.edu/~gelman/stuff_for_blog/susie.pdf
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