Does your name determine your destiny? Let’s talk about this. Roman had a saying “nomen est omen” ,or “name is destiny”. To some remarkable degree, one’s name does matter, and what one is called influences the way people perceive him and the way he perceives himself. Is this really true, let’s see…

Anecdote：

Remembering what Andrew said about Anecdotes, there are lots of anecdotes for this phenomenon. Back to my home country, I found it very interesting that people with first name meaning “patriotic” are likely to become politicians. Besides that, I also found the people who have the given name meaning “doctor” are also likely to become doctors. I don’t really know about American names. But as I looked it up on the internet, not surprisingly I found similar patterns existed. And I also found an interesting term called “Nominative determinism”, which implies a person’s name can have a significant impact in choosing their jobs or profession and in shaping their characteristics.

In past several decades, there are many study done in this topic

With a null hypothesis that students whose names begin with letters associated with bad grades are likely doing poorly in school, researchers run an experiment. To test the hypothesis, researchers acquired data from a large private university, and the data contains all kinds of racial groups. They first identified students whose first or last names began with letter A, B,C or D, excluding those with conflicting first and last initials(e.g. first initial A and last initial D). In addition, students who have initials E to Z are sorted into “Others”. In this study, the factors controlled are demographic and graduation year. The result are followed below

It was the same as the researcher predicted; the experiment concluded that there is a strong name-performance correlation in this case, and the “other” column shows the lower average GPA was caused by the initials C and D. However, correlation does not equal to causation. There probably is a third variable in between. For instance, we don’t know if teachers give the grades based on students’ name deliberately, rather than their students are responsible for the result observed. Furthermore, the sample size was not mentioned in this experiment,thus it could be the factor cause the inaccuracy.

How we explain．．．

There is no scientific evidence prove names does affect our destiny．psychologically, this phenomenon can be attributed to how we react our own names. From the study above, we can explain it, saying children who like their names turn out to be more confident and self-assertive than those who don’t. Thinking about how many time in a given day, while meeting people ,the first name you ask is “ what’s you name” but if one have a name he doesn’t like, he should not be confident.

In Conclusion..

I found it is really hard to prove the causation between name and one’s future. However, name liking in fact affects life outcomes though very implicit way. A name can exert unconscious influence over one’s decision making. It just can be not totally due to chance that in American people named Dennis are more likely become an dentist, same thing with people named starting with La and lawyer.

at last, here is a video about this interesting phenomenon

Work Cited

http://psu.summon.serialssolutions.com/search/results?spellcheck=true&s.q=name+success+correlation#!/search/document?ho=t&fvf=ContentType,Journal%20Article,f&l=en&q=name%20profession%20correlation&id=FETCHMERGED-LOGICAL-p540-687fe246ba3feec1aedf7a53127b0961a32c1ebae1fcad9947978e24fbc7c2af2

http://pss.sagepub.com/content/18/12/1106.full

http://jcr.oxfordjournals.org/content/38/2/300.abstract

http://www.bmj.com/content/347/bmj.f6627