Naming newborn babies are a big deal to new parents. Could computer keyboards really determine how parents name their children? You encounter many different names in your life, but some names happen to be more commonly used and known around the world. Is the “QWERTY effect” real?
A new study believes the involvement of computers contribute to parent’s decision on picking their child’s name. According to an article in the Huffington’s Post, “Parents ten to select baby names that can be easily typed on the right side of the QWERTY keyboard.” Many parents ten to choose names that contain letters from the right side of the keyboard. Names such as Liam, Noah, Lola, and Violet are popular names this year and use letters mainly from the right side of the keyboard. But why?
We unknowingly choose these names. Co-author Daniel Casasanto, a p psychology professor at the University of Chicago, stated, “It doesn’t mean that suddenly everyone is naming all of their babies with letters from the right side instead of the left. This is an effect that works unconsciously and can only be detect statistically. ”Researchers studied naming statistics with names of children born between 1960 and 2012. 1990 was the beginning of the QWERTY era, which was also when computer keyboards became popular around the world. Researchers concluded that because most humans are right-handed, therefore parents choose baby names on the right hand side of the keyboard. We used our dominant hand to do most things in life with ease. People associate that side with positive things, which would include their child’s name.
I agree with most of this article when it states that your dominate hand can influence what you do. Yet, I do believe that chance exists. Maybe many parents just happen to choose names from the right side of the keyboard and it so happened to be in the same year as many other parents. They are billions of people in the world, therefore it can be hard to calculate if the majority of parents named their children from the right side of the keyboard. Also, the parents that were in this study could have been all right-handed. I believe more left-handed people should of been in the study in order to get better and more accurate findings.
Sources: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/09/16/qwerty-effect-baby-names_n_5822960.html?utm_hp_ref=science
I would have to disagree with the article that you analyzed for the most part. Last year I read a novel called Freakonomics and in one chapter, it discussed name-choosing. This article claims that in a particular year, names that can be typed on the right side of the keyboard were common among right-handed parents. This could be a correlation if anything, but definitely not causation. The popularity of names changes from year to year so it makes sense if several names were common. This isn’t because they are right-handed, it’s simply because those specific names were trendy in that year. This is definitely a work of chance.
I have never heard anything quite like this. I probably would say it is not true and is just chance. I doubt parents are naming their child a certain name based on the fact that most letters in that particular name are on one side of a keyboard, it just does not make sense. I could be wrong, though.