What’s in a name?

Why your birth certificate may have set your fate

Does your name affect the way others see you? At first glance, this seems unlikely – yet research suggests otherwise.

University of Florida professor David Figlio assessed the names of schoolchildren across the state according to how often each name was chosen for a white or an Afro-american child, as well as how often it was chosen by parents who had lower or higher incomes. He then analysed school test scores of 55,046 pupils and found that the “poorer” and “less white” the name, the lower the school test scores and the lower were teacher expectations as indicated by whether the child was nominated to attend a gifted children programme.

This might be explained by a number of factors, had the finding not been upheld even when comparing brothers: when one had a name that sounded “white” and the other’s sounded more Afro-american, their academic prospects often differed significantly.

Marianne Bertrand and Sendhi Mullainathan at the University of Chicago sent out 5,000 CVS in response to job adverts in Boston and Chicago. The same CV was sent under fake names – half were by candidates with white-sounding names such as “Emily Walsh”; half were assigned names often chosen by Afro-american families, such as “Lakisha Washington”. The callback rate was 50per cent higher for applicants who had white-sounding names.

At Stockholm University, Mahmood Arai and Peter Skogman Thoursie compared the earnings of a group of immigrants who changed their names to Swedish-sounding or neutral names with a group of immigrants matched for earnings, but who chose not to change names. Later, the researchers compared the earnings of the groups again. Those who’d changed their names earned around 26 per cent more than those who had not.

These findings suggest, although they do not prove, that we’re influenced more than we realise by the associations we attach to a name. But does name power go further? Does our name also influence the way we present ourselves? A recent study at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem suggests this may be so.

Yonat Zwebner and colleagues presented

121 Israeli participants with colour headshots of unfamiliar faces and asked them to choose each person’s name from a list of five possibilities. Participants chose correctly 30 per cent of the time, significantly more often than by chance.

The team then repeated the study with 116 French participants. Again, participants got it right significantly more often than would be predicted by chance. The finding was upheld even when participants were shown just a stranger’s hairstyle, an aspect of appearance we can control.

Preconceptions obscure reality. When you first meet someone, try to get to know them before you judge their character.