Taking a more empirical look at the potential positive effects of unusual naming, Zweigenhaft randomly selected 2,000 people from
The Social Register
(described as the “best guide to the membership of the national upper classes”), and identified those who were mentioned only once; this process generated a list of 218 people. Zweigenhaft then generated a control group by randomly selecting 218 people who did not have unusual names in the original sample of 2,000. Next, he consulted
Who’s Who
(described as a book listing “the best known men and women in all lines of useful and reputable achievement”) to discover whether people with usual or unusual names tended to obtain eminence. Of the total of 436 possibilities (2 x 218), 30 were listed. Of these, 23 from the unusual names group were listed in
Who’s Who,
versus just 7 of those with more usual names. In short, evidence that under certain circumstances, an unusual name can be good for your career.
Work examining the effects that people’s names have on their lives is not just concerned with whether a name is unusual or usual. The remarkable research of Brett Pelham and his colleagues at the State University of New York at Buffalo suggests that people’s names may influence the towns in which we choose to live, the career paths we follow, whom we marry, and even the political parties we support.
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By looking at a huge number of U.S. census records, Pelham has uncovered an overrepresentation of people called Florence living in Florida, George in Georgia, Kenneth in Kentucky, and Virgil in Virginia. In another study, the team examined the Social Security death records of 66 million American people who had died in cities starting with the term “Saint” (for example, St. Anne, St. Louis, etc.). Once again, they found proportionately more people called Helen in St. Helen, more Charleses in St. Charles, more Thomases in St Thomas, and so on. Further analyses suggested that these effects do not occur because parents name their offspring after the children’s places of birth but because people drift toward cities and towns containing their own names.
Could the same effects even influence people’s choice of marriage partner? Are people more likely to marry someone whose surname starts with the same letter as their own? Pelham and his colleagues looked at more than 15,000 marriage records between 1823 and 1965.
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An intriguing pattern emerged: Significantly more couples had family names with the same initial than predicted by chance. Worried that the effect might be due to ethnic matching (that is, members of certain ethnic groups being likely to marry one another and have surnames starting with certain letters), the team repeated the study, but this time focussed on the five most common American surnames: Smith, Johnson, Williams, Jones, and Brown. Once again the effect emerged; for instance, people named Smith were more likely to marry another Smith than someone called Jones or Williams, and people called Jones were more likely to say “I do” to another Jones than a Brown or even a Johnson.
Pelham’s work is not restricted to examining the relationship between people’s names, where they choose to live and die, and the people they marry. He has also examined how surnames may influence choice of occupation. Searching the online records of the American Dental Association and American Bar Association, the researchers found that there were more dentists whose first names began with “Den” than with “Law.” Likewise, a greater preponderance of lawyers had first names beginning with “Law” than with “Den.” Then there is the data from hardware and roofing companies. Using the
Yahoo Internet Yellow Pages,
the team searched for all the hardware stores and roofing companies in the twenty largest U.S. cities; then they examined whether the owners’ first names or surnames began with the letter
H
or
R.
The results revealed that the names of owners of hardware companies tended to start with the letter
H
(such as Harris Hardware), and the names of those in charge of roofing companies tended to start with
R
(such as Rashid’s Roofing). According to Pelham, the same effect even extends into politics. During the 2000 presidential campaign, people whose surnames began with the letter
B
were especially likely to make contributions to the Bush campaign, whereas those whose surnames began with the letter
G
were more likely to contribute to the Gore campaign. Writing about his results in paper titled “Why Susie Sells Seashells by the Seashore: Implicit Egotism and Major Life Decisions,” Pelham concludes that perhaps we should not be surprised by these effects, noting that they “merely consist of being attracted to that which reminds us of the one person most of us love most dearly.”
In addition to being interesting in its own right, Pelham’s work may at last provide an explanation for an effect that has fascinated psychologists for decades: Why does a surname so often match the bearer’s chosen occupation?
In 1975, Lawrence Casler from the State University of New York at Geneseo compiled a list of more than two hundred academics working in fields associated with their last names.
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Casler’s list includes an underwater archaeologist called Bass, a relationship counselor called Breedlove, a taxation expert named Due, a gynecologist named Hyman, and an educational psychologist studying parental pressure called Mumpower. In the later 1990s,
New Scientist
magazine asked readers to send in similar examples from their own lives. The resulting list included music teachers Miss Beat and Miss Sharp, members of the British Meteorological Office called Flood, Frost, Thundercliffe, and Weatherall, a sex therapist named Lust, Peter Atchoo the pneumonia specialist, a firm of lawyers named Lawless and Lynch, private detectives Wyre and Tapping, and the head of a psychiatric hospital, Dr. McNutt. My own favorites are the authors of the book
A Student’s Guide to the Seashore:
John and Susan Fish.
Pelham’s work suggests that examples such as these may not happen entirely by chance; rather, some people may be unconsciously drawn to occupations related to their names. As a professor of psychology called Wiseman, I am in no position to be skeptical about the theory.
HIDDEN PERSUADERS
Our names are assigned to us the moment we are born and, for most people, remain throughout their lives. However, some of the other factors that influence our thoughts and behavior are far more subtle. Sometimes, it can just be a single sentence, a short piece of music, or a newspaper headline.
It really doesn’t take much to change the way in which a person thinks, feels, and behaves. The concept is beautifully illustrated in two studies recently published in one of the world’s most prestigious academic publications, the
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
In the first of these, conducted by John Bargh and his colleagues at New York University, participants were asked to rearrange a series of scrambled words to form a coherent sentence.
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Half the participants were shown mixed up sentences that contained words relating to the elderly, such as “man’s was skin the wrinkled.” The remaining participants were shown the same mixed-up sentences, but the one word relating to the elderly was replaced with a word not associated with old age, such as “man’s was skin the smooth.” Once participants had carefully worked their way through the sentences, the experimenter thanked them for taking part and gave them directions to the nearest set of elevators. The participants thought the experiment was over. In reality, the important part was just about to begin. A second experimenter was sitting in the hallway armed with a stopwatch. When participants emerged from the laboratory, this second experimenter secretly recorded the time taken for them to walk down the hallway to the elevators. Those who had just spent time unscrambling the sentences that contained words relating to old age took significantly longer than those who had spent time with the nonelderly sentences. Just spending a few minutes thinking about words such as “wrinkled,” “gray,”
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“bingo,” and “Florida” had completely changed the way people behaved. Without realizing it, those few words had “added” years to their lives and they were walking like elderly people.
A similar study, conducted by Ap Dijksterhuis and Ad van Knippenberg from the University of Nijmegen in Holland, asked participants to spend five minutes jotting down a few sentences about the behavior, lifestyle, and appearance of a typical football hooligan, while others did exactly the same for a typical professor.
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Everyone was then asked about forty Trivial Pursuit questions, such as “What is the capital of Bangladesh?” or “Which country hosted the 1990 Soccer World Cup?” Those who had spent just five minutes thinking about a typical football hooligan managed to answer 46 percent of the questions correctly, whereas those who had generated sentences related to a typical professor were right 60 percent of the time. Although people were unaware of it, their ability to answer questions correctly was dramatically altered by simply thinking about a stereotypical football hooligan or a professor.
This is all well and good within the relatively artificial confines of a laboratory, but how do the same effects influence people’s behavior in the real world?
Americans leave about $26 billion in restaurant tips every year. You would think the size of the tip would depend on the quality of food, drink, or service provided, but secret studies conducted in bars and restaurants around the globe have revealed the hidden factors that really determine our tipping behavior. Mood plays a large part in the process. Happy eaters are bigger tippers. In one study, French bar staff were asked to give their customers a small card with the bill.
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Half the cards contained an advertisement for a local nightclub; the other half contained the following joke:
An Eskimo had been waiting for his girlfriend in front of a movie theater for a long time, and it was getting colder and colder. After a while, shivering with cold and rather infuriated, he opened his coat and drew out a thermometer. He then said loudly, “If she is not here by fifteen degrees, I’m going!”
Those receiving the joke showed a higher level of laughing and, more important, tipping. Researchers have replicated the relationship between happiness and tipping time and again. Waiters receive bigger tips when they draw happy faces, write “Thank you” at the bottom of a bill, or give a big smile to customers.
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People tip more when the sun is shining, and even when waiters tell them that the sun is shining.
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Other studies have shown that tipping is dramatically increased when waiters introduced themselves by their first name, or refer to customers by name.
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Then there is the power of touch. Describing their work in a paper titled “The Midas Touch: The Effects of Interpersonal Touch on Restaurant Tipping,” April Crusco and her collegue explain how they trained two waitresses to touch diners’ palms or shoulders for exactly one and a half seconds as they gave them the bill.
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Both kinds of touching produced more tipping than the hands-off approach adopted in the control condition, with palm touching doing slightly better than a tap on the shoulder.
Leaving relatively small amounts of money to waiters and bar staff is one thing, but do these subtle effects persuade people to part with much larger sums of cash? In the 1990s, researchers Charles Areni and David Kim from Texas Tech University investigated exactly this issue by systematically varying the music being played in a downtown wine shop.
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Half the customers were subjected to classical tunes, including Mozart, Mendelssohn, and Chopin; the other half heard pop songs, including Fleetwood Mac, Robert Plant, and Rush. By disguising themselves as shop assistants making an inventory of stock, the experimenters were able to observe customers’ behavior, including the number of bottles they picked up from the shelves, whether they read the labels, and, most important of all, the amount of wine they bought.
The results were impressive. The music did not affect how long people stayed in the cellar, how many bottles they examined, or even the number of items they bought. Instead, it had a dramatic effect on just one aspect of their behavior—the cost of the wine they bought. When the classical music was playing, people bought bottles of wine that were, on average, more than three times more expensive than those they bought when the pop music was playing. The researchers believe that hearing the classical music unconsciously made shoppers feel more sophisticated, and this in turn caused them to buy significantly more expensive wine.
There is even some evidence to suggest that the same sort of subtle stimuli influence matters of life and death. Jimmie Rogers (not Kenny), a professor of sociology, analyzed more than 1,400 country songs and discovered that the lyrics often refer to topics associated with negative life experiences, including unrequited love, alcohol abuse, financial problems, hopelessness, fatalism, bitterness, and poverty.
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In the mid-1990s, Steven Stack from Wayne State University and Jim Gundlach from Auburn University wondered whether continual exposure to downbeat topics might make people more likely to commit suicide.
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To find out, the researchers looked at the suicide rate and the amount of country music played on national radio in forty-nine areas across the United States. After controlling for several other factors, such as poverty, divorce, and gun ownership, the researchers did find that the more country music played on the radio, the higher the suicide rate.