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April 16, 2012

Does Your Name Determine Your Destiny?

The idea that our names are intertwined with our destinies goes at least as far back as the book of Genesis in the Bible, when Abram saw his name changed to Abraham, which means "father of multitudes" in Hebrew. In more recent years, social psychology research has connected people's names to decisions they make in whom to marry, what street to live on and what they do for a living — all based on how similar the names were to a person’s own name. But University of Pennsylvania researcher Uri Simonsohn is stirring controversy by questioning how much our names really matter in making life's more important decisions. Simonsohn examined whether people are likely to choose their workplaces based on how similar the company names are to their own.

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