What’s in a name? Perhaps less than we sometimes think

Amarket trader has been banned from shouting about his fruit and vegetables. So what, you may ask? The story might not have made the news if it weren’t for the noisy seller’s name. It is, of course, Wayne Bellows.

Mr Bellows seems to be a case of nominative determinism. This is the idea that your name somehow, through some arcane mechanism we don’t yet understand, actually helps determine your destiny. It was first popularised by the New Scientist magazine, which highlighted several examples, such as a study on incontinence in the British Journal of Urology by doctors Splatt and Weedon and a book on the North Pole by Daniel Snowman.

We’re all familiar with Usain Bolt, though fewer of us know of the firefighter Les Mcburney. There is a banker called Rich Ricci, and the lewd American politician Anthony Weiner. But can it really be true that our name determines our fate? And if so, how?

One obvious possibility is that it is driven by stereotyping. We are all capable of consciously or unconsciously absorbing and playing into the assumptions of those around us. The senior judge Lord Judge felt his job was a coincidence, but the barrister James Counsel suspected he had been affected by his name.

The problem is that these are all anecdotes. We all suffer from reporting bias: the tendency to share interesting information. For every Mr Bun the baker there are many Buns who have never baked. Confirmation bias means we focus on what supports our pre-existing ideas and ignore the vast evidence to the contrary. So is it all just coincidence?

The most well-known study to support the idea of nominative determinism was published in 2002 by the prosaically named Brett Pelham. His explanation was nominative determinism is an extension of a broader phenomenon known as “implicit egotism”, an unconscious preference for things resembling the self, which includes choosing careers that resemble our own names. The researchers found that people named Dennis or Denise were overrepresented among dentists, for instance.

In 2011, psychologist Uri Simonsohn claimed that the effect of names didn’t exist, that it was the result of a statistical artefact. Pelham did a follow-up study, “When Tex and Tess Carpenter Build Houses in Texas”, but Simonsohn countered that too. Still, the idea of nominative determinism continues to be covered as the truth in pop culture and even psychology textbooks.

What of Mr Bellows? You could suggest that his name alone influenced his career path, but he’s a fourthgeneration fruit-and-veg seller. It’s often said that names originate from the trades practised by our ancestors, implying that skills are somehow inherited. That could mean Butchers and Bakers still have the genetic traits which made their ancestors good at slaughtering animals and rolling pastry. On the other hand, it is far more likely that children are simply raised to respect and value the profession of their parents. After all, following one’s elders into their jobs was the norm for hundreds of years in the West.

It’s tempting to believe in nominative determinism. It is delicious, if scary, to think we might be so easily pigeonholed. For now, though, the evidence just isn’t there. If it were, that would really be something to shout about.