Subscribe
The latest psychology and neuroscience discoveries.
My Account
  • Mental Health
  • Social Psychology
  • Cognitive Science
  • Psychopharmacology
  • Neuroscience
  • About
No Result
View All Result
PsyPost
PsyPost
No Result
View All Result
Home Exclusive Social Psychology

New psychology research reveals surprising link between your name and your life choices

by Mane Kara-Yakoubian
June 10, 2024
in Social Psychology
(Photo credit: Adobe Stock)

(Photo credit: Adobe Stock)

Share on TwitterShare on Facebook
Stay on top of the latest psychology findings: Subscribe now!

Would someone named Dennis be more likely to be a dentist and live in Denver? A new study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology suggests yes.

Nominative determinism is the idea that people are drawn to professions or places that share the same initial letter as their name, building on the concept of implicit egotism, which posits that people are naturally drawn to things that resemble themselves. By analyzing text corpora from Common Crawl, Twitter, Google News, and Google Books, Promothesh Chatterjee and colleagues tested whether this tendency could influence major life decisions such as career paths and city choices.

The researchers used pre-trained word embeddings from large text datasets to measure the cosine similarity between vectors representing names and professions or city names. They focused on first names, arguing these are more central to personal identity than surnames, which can change over a lifetime. The datasets included 3,410 names from the U.S. Social Security Administration, which appeared consistently across all years between 2011-2020. Names were matched with ethnicity data from Tzioumis (2018). Professions and cities were extracted and filtered to include only single-word entries (e.g., “doctor”, “Chicago”).

The researchers controlled for various factors, including gender, ethnicity, and the frequency of names and professions, to isolate the effect of nominative determinism.

The researcher team found a consistent effect of nominative determinism across all datasets. Names with a high cosine similarity to certain professions (for example, Dennis and dentist, Dennis and Denver) were more common than would be expected by chance. This pattern also held true for city choices, where names were more likely to be associated with cities sharing the same initial letter. The findings were consistent across decades, demonstrating that the nominative determinism effect has been a stable phenomenon throughout the 20th century.

Interestingly, the researchers observed a Decade by Gender interaction in the nominative determinism effect for professions. Men exhibited a stronger nominative determinism effect in the early 20th century, but this difference diminished over time as women gained more career choices. This shift suggests that as societal norms evolved, allowing women more freedom in career selection, their names played a more significant role in their professional identities.

Increased access to higher education reduced the effect of name initials on career choices, suggesting that those with higher education are less influenced by nominative determinism, perhaps because their education provides a stronger identity marker than their name.

A limitation noted by the authors is the cross-sectional nature of the data. While the datasets provided a snapshot of nominative determinism, they do not capture longitudinal changes within individuals’ lifespans.

The study, “Does the first letter of one’s name affect life decisions? A natural language processing examination of nominative determinism”, was authored by Promothesh Chatterjee, Himanshu Mishra, and Arul Mishra.

RELATED

New research on political animosity reveals an “ominous” trend
Donald Trump

Researchers rushed to study the aftermath of the Trump shooting. Here’s what they found

September 3, 2025
Neuroscientists just rewrote our understanding of psychedelics with a groundbreaking receptor-mapping study
Social Psychology

What teddy bears reveal about comfort and care

September 3, 2025
Neuroscientists just rewrote our understanding of psychedelics with a groundbreaking receptor-mapping study
Dark Triad

Dark Triad personalities may be easier to scam than you’d think

September 3, 2025
Do men find female genitalia attractive? Here’s what the research says
Relationships and Sexual Health

Study finds women tend to favor sweet actions over sweet words in romantic partners

September 2, 2025
Neuroscientists just rewrote our understanding of psychedelics with a groundbreaking receptor-mapping study
Political Psychology

Study finds partisan hostility drives protest participation in the United States

September 2, 2025
Neuroscientists just rewrote our understanding of psychedelics with a groundbreaking receptor-mapping study
Mental Health

Online hate speech mirrors language in Cluster B personality disorder forums

September 1, 2025
People who believe in conspiracy theories process information differently at the neural level
Narcissism

Narcissists are drawn to a particular kind of news story, psychologists find

August 31, 2025
Trump’s speeches stump AI: Study reveals ChatGPT’s struggle with metaphors
Donald Trump

Trump shows signs of cognitive shift after 2024 shooting, study suggests

August 31, 2025

STAY CONNECTED

LATEST

Common artificial sweeteners linked to cognitive decline in large study

Researchers rushed to study the aftermath of the Trump shooting. Here’s what they found

What teddy bears reveal about comfort and care

Individuals experiencing faster biological aging are at increased risk of dementia

Young adults with different ADHD symptom profiles face distinct cannabis-related risks

Dark Triad personalities may be easier to scam than you’d think

Study finds women tend to favor sweet actions over sweet words in romantic partners

Study finds partisan hostility drives protest participation in the United States

         
       
  • Contact us
  • Privacy policy
  • Terms and Conditions
[Do not sell my information]

Welcome Back!

Login to your account below

Forgotten Password?

Retrieve your password

Please enter your username or email address to reset your password.

Log In

Add New Playlist

Subscribe
  • My Account
  • Cognitive Science Research
  • Mental Health Research
  • Social Psychology Research
  • Drug Research
  • Relationship Research
  • About PsyPost
  • Contact
  • Privacy Policy