As believing Jews, we’ve always known a person’s name has mystical connotations. In recent years, secular studies, too, reveal that the moniker a person receives at birth has strong implications on the choices he’ll make in life and the type of personality he will develop.
We are familiar with the Torah concept of shma garam: The names of people in Tanach are at the very least reflective and often causative of the way the person turns out. Think of the rebelliousness of Nimrod and the degenerate behavior of Naval. Modern psychologists are now documenting a similar phenomenon in a host of fascinating studies.
Remember the old playground song? “A my name is Anna and I come fromAlabama. My husband’s name is Albert and I like to eat apples.” Well it turns out that there’s something to this exercise in alliteration. Research reveals that people are unconsciously drawn to things people and places that sound like their own names in a psychological phenomenon called “implicit egotism.”
While sometimes the process is overt (such as the Los Angeles woman named Sue Yoo who after getting one too many clever comments about her litigious name sure enough became a lawyer) often it is quite subtle. A SUNY–Buffalo study on the implicit egotism effect on life decisions (Pelham Mirenberg and Jones) found that there are a disproportionate number of Phillips living inPhiladelphiaand Mildreds living inMilwaukee. Louise is 18 percent more likely to move toLouisianathan her friend Barbara. And if there is a perfect match between name and state — i.e. GeorgiaorVirginia— then this percentage jumps to 36 percent.
Curiously this name-place effect seems to be stronger for women than men. Researchers conclude that women tend to be more attached to their first names and initials than men are; men on the other hand show a greater attachment for their surnames likely because unlike women they are identified by the same family name for the duration of their lives.
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