The first letter of your first name can affect your career and where you live.
New research suggests that the first letter of your first name can influence your life choices. From career paths to residential preferences, individuals gravitate slightly toward cities and occupations that align with the first letter of their names.
Previous studies this phenomenon had been hinted at. For example, people named Dennis were overrepresented among dentists listed on the American Dental Association website. Likewise, those named Lauren or Lawrence accounted for a larger percentage of lawyers, according to the American Bar Association database. Individuals named George and Geoffrey were more likely to publish in geoscience-related journals, and individuals named Louis were disproportionately likely to reside in St. Louis.
However, previous research was criticized because it was limited to only a few professions, cities and names. New studies published in Journal of Personality and Social Psychology by professors at the University of Utah address this criticism by using language models to capture and analyze millions of occurrences of people’s names. The current study looked at all names on the US Social Security Administration website, 508 occupations and 14,856 cities. First names were preferred over last names because most people keep the same first name throughout their lives. The researchers used language processing algorithms to determine how first names, occupations, and cities correlated across Common Crawl (a web crawl repository), Twitter, and Google News.
Their research showed a greater tendency for individuals to pursue careers and live in cities that begin with the same letter as their first name. This preference stems from our tendency to have positive feelings about ourselves. This positive feeling extends to everything we associate with our identity—even the first letters of our name. In general, we tend to prefer letters that appear in our name more than those that don’t, and we especially like the first letters of our first and last names. This letter preference has been established in the 14 countries.
The latest research shows that, by extension, people also prefer cities and occupations represented by these same letters. The results suggest that our life choices may not strictly adhere to rational decision making.
The researchers called this preference for cities and occupations that begin with the first letter of your first name “nominal determinism.” However, they note that there is nothing predetermined about this. People still have free choice and are just exhibiting these little unconscious preferences. When asked specifically, people are likely unaware that their name letter preference may have influenced their life decisions.
Interestingly, men were more likely than women to choose occupations based on the first letter of their first name. However, when the researchers broke down the data by decade, they found that this gender gap was more pronounced in the early 20th century. As women gained more freedom in their career choices, the gender gap narrowed. “As we move from earlier to later decades, there is only a marginal difference in how men exhibit the phenomenon of nominal determinism, indicating that at a conceptual level, their ability to choose occupations has not changed much. However, for women, an increasing phenomenon of name determinism suggests that their ability to choose an occupation that matches their name has improved,” the researchers I am writing. (Since there was no Twitter or Google News in the early 20th century, the researchers analyzed Google Books information about material written between 1900 and 2000.)
But research revealed that women prefer the first letter of their surname more, while men prefer the first letter of their surname. Since women are more likely to change their family names when they marry, they have more positive feelings about the specific letters of the name that they will keep for life.
Clearly, there is more to our names than most of us realize. It is important to note that this is a relatively small effect, and most people do not live in cities or work in occupations that begin with the first letter of their name. However, it is interesting to discover how these factors could influence our life choices.
