“Wherefore art thou Romeo? Initially, I have the answer … - National”

Wherefore art thou Romeo? Initially, I have the answer … - National

Posted: 24 Nov 2009 12:07 PM PST

Justin Thomas

Last Updated: November 24. 2009 8:48PM UAE / November 24. 2009 4:48PM GMT

The first impression-forming word we utter to a new acquaintance is often our name. Anyone who was taunted at school because of their name will appreciate how important and life-shaping it can be. To my teachers and other would-be comedians I was always Just-in time.

The Islamic tradition encourages beautiful names and discourages those with negative meanings. The Prophet Mohammed is reported to have encouraged Umar ibn al Khattab to change his daughters name from Asiyah (disobedient) to Jamila (beautiful), and he advised a man called Hazn (hard) to adopt the name Sahl (easy). For more individualistic names, look to the stars. The rock legend Frank Zappa named his children Moon Unit, Dweezil and Diva Muffin; the Geldolf girls are Peaches, Pixie and Fifi Trixibelle; Sylvester Stallones son is Sage Moonblood; and Nicole Richie and Joel Madden have named their son Sparrow. His schooldays hardly bear thinking about.

Nor is the appetite for unconventional names restricted to showbusiness. When I was growing up our next-door neighbours, who might charitably be described as New Age, allowed their children to name themselves. Their six-year-old daughter introduced herself to me as Kia-Pancake. Aged 8, I thought this was the coolest thing I had ever heard. I harboured ambitions to rename myself Spiderman-Fonzarelli. Fortunately, my mother was not New Age.

Names dont have to be either too common or too unusual to have consequences. You may be unfortunate enough to have an unexceptional name that someone else has turned into an international brand. For example, if your name happens to be Michael Jackson, Jennifer Lopez or Nancy Ajram, then you are un-Googleable and probably always will be.

Might Google-ability influence the next generations baby-name choices? If so, we can expect greater variability. I would be much more Googleable if my name were Justyn Thomass (and as Spiderman-Fonzarelli I would surely have hit the top of the search pile). Better still, in the spirit of the iPod and iPhone, why not introduce the iName – an absolutely unique one that precedes your first. It would not be unprecedented: Mustafa Kemal made surnames mandatory for all citizens of Turkey in the 1930s, himself adopting Ataturk (Father Turk) as uniquely his own.

Recent research suggests that not only are names important, but even our initials can be subtly predictive. Psychologists call this the name letter effect (NLE). In an article called Moniker maladies: when names sabotage success, published in Psychological Science in 2007, researchers found that students with A and B in their initials had significantly higher grade-point averages and went to higher ranking law schools than their counterparts whose names began with C or D.

One explanation is that we have an unconscious preference for the letters of our own name, especially our initials, and that somehow these unconscious preferences can work against us. The basic idea is that we are unconsciously attracted towards name-resembling choices and outcomes even if such outcomes would be consciously avoided. In short, the NLE suggests that Jamal is more likely than Ahmed to work as a Journalist, marry Jamila, drive a Jaguar and have children called Jaffar and Jehan.

Even if we leave aside these rather spooky speculations we find more easily comprehensible NLEs based on our tendency to alphabetacise. Another study has reported a relationship between success as an economist and surname initials, favouring economists with initials earlier in the alphabet. The authors of the study, published in the Journal of Economic Perspectives, explain their findings as alphabetic discrimination; they suggest that publishing practice in the academic world of economics is to list authors alphabetically, and this explains the bias.

So economists with surnames earlier in the alphabet will gain more immediate visibility, based on the assumption that we dont read the full list of authors, let alone remember them all. To further support this observation, the authors also looked at similar data for psychologists. Unlike economics, psychology does not normally alphabetacise authorship – and for psychologists there was no sign of alphabetic discrimination.

So, if you have a newborn daughter and you want her to be a Grade A-winning economist easily found on Google, name her Aaliya.

Dr Justin Thomas is a psychologist in the department of Natural Science and Public Health at Zayed University

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