Growing up, Adam Weiner was bullied over his last name. Now it’s one of his biggest assets.
Dr Weiner is a urologist, and he says the name has been a huge help in working with patients. “When men come and see me for the first time, they’re typically pretty nervous,” he says. “And let me tell you, having a last name like Weiner in this field is one of the best icebreakers.” Patients routinely come in with a name-related joke, and the tension dissolves. “I don’t mind it one bit,” Weiner says. The name has also helped him achieve prominence in his field. “Researchers, other faculty, other institutions, they tend to remember the urologist named Dr Weiner.”
Weiner’s name is an example of an aptronym, one that perfectly fits its owner. Which, as many of his patients have noted, raises a burning question: did his name influence his choice of career? That touches on the concept of what’s called nominative determinism, the controversial idea that a person’s name can influence their choices. (Turns out, urology is a particularly rich field: when New Scientist magazine began exploring nominative determinism in the 90s, two key examples were experts named Splatt and Weedon.)
This year, the Trump-supporting activist-investor Bill Ackman, known for fighting to oust Harvard’s former president Claudine Gay, endorsed the theory. “I have a view that people become their names,” he told New York Magazine. “My name is Ackman – it’s like activist man.” It’s a pretty weak assertion, but there are plenty of better examples: writers like William Wordsworth, Francine Prose and Sarah Vowell (not to mention the crime writer Karin Slaughter – not a pen name); athletes such as Usain Bolt, the WNBA star Aerial Powers and the baseball pitcher Brad Hand; food experts like the cookbook writer Joséphine Bacon and Ed Currie, who invented what’s billed as “the world’s hottest pepper”. The head of Nintendo of America is Doug Bowser – he arrived long after Mario’s archenemy got his name – and the founder of Tito’s Vodka is named Tito Beveridge.
“Name is destiny,” says Becca Title, who owns San Diego’s Meet Cute bookstore and admires the way romance novels give hints to the characters’ destinies in their names. But is there any truth to the idea?
Brett Pelham, a psychology professor at Montgomery College in Maryland, says yes – and he’s done a series of studies backing the claim. A 2002 study found that people named Dennis were more likely than people with equally common names – like Jerry or Walter – to become dentists. The study faced some criticism: another researcher, Uri Simonsohn, pointed out that Dennises are also more likely to be lawyers than people named Walter.
But in 2015, Pelham and a colleague, Mauricio Carvallo, published findings that people with 11 common surnames – including Baker, Carpenter and Farmer – were disproportionately likely to work in fields that matched their names. While confounding variables are easy to spot when it comes to first names – maybe the type of people who name their kids Dennis are the type of people who encourage their kids to work in healthcare, last names are less vulnerable to this risk, Pelham says. (Yes, they might be descended from an ancient baker, but the many generations in between make any connection unlikely, he notes.)
Pelham acknowledges the risk of “cherry-picking” in any sociological study, but he’s confident in his results, which he believes demonstrate an idea called implicit egotism: the idea that we unconsciously favor names, numbers (such as birth dates), colors and other concepts related to ourselves. He doesn’t think the phenomenon is “magical or mystical”, he says. “We think it’s probably based mainly on things like classical conditioning and the well-known ‘mere exposure’ effect – the more often people see something, the more they like it.”
Simonsohn, for his part, remains unconvinced. In an email, he calls the idea “a fun but unsubstantiated belief” that is “almost surely wrong, but harmless”.
When the Guardian spoke to people whose names match their jobs, none were fully convinced that their monikers had actually sparked career choices. But several, like Weiner, said their names have had a clear impact – whether positive or negative – on their daily lives.
Dustin Partridge’s whole family loves the outdoors - “you’ll very often find a Partridge out in the woods,” he says – and like Weiner, his name was a boon in the workplace. Researching bird-friendly green roofs in New York City, he needed access to strangers’ buildings. “‘Dustin Partridge here, looking to study birds on your roof,’” he would tell people. “That’s a crazy thing to ask for, and several people have said: ‘The only reason I opened this responded to you is because of the last name.’”
Now he works at the NYC Bird Alliance (former director: John Flicker). Before Partridge joined, he’d have scoffed at any supposed name-job connection. But then he weighed in on bird safety with a Quayle and tackled conservation with a Forrest. “There might be something to it,” he says.
But aptronyms can also weigh heavily on their owners. David Loud, a longtime Broadway conductor and pianist, once feared he’d never get work: “I mean, who would ever want to deliberately hire a loud musician?” he writes in an email.
When he got jobs accompanying singers, he says “it became my lifelong goal never to get the review: ‘The aptly named David Loud drowned out all traces of the poor soprano.’” Now, as a conductor, he chooses volume-related words carefully. “‘Could the violas play those sixteenth notes more robustly?’ I might say, or, ‘The ending is too bombastic!’”
For the writer Francine Prose, the connection has mostly been an annoyance. Her last name was shortened when her family arrived in the US in the early 20th century; they didn’t realize Prose was an English word. Though she did have an editor named Page Cuddy, she doesn’t buy claims that our names inspire our fates. The main thing she’s learned from the phenomenon is how often people think they’re the first to notice something obvious.
Fellow author Sarah Vowell is equally skeptical. “I am a nonfiction writer and we generally do not believe in fate, only coincidence,” she writes in an email, pointing out that other Vowells in her family have included a machinist, a pharmacist and a shepherd turned doctor. “Fate seems more important to the liars writing fiction, or, apparently, the self-absorbed rich guy who inspired your question,” she said, referring to Ackman.
Does it matter whether there’s any truth to all this? Pamela Redmond, co-founder of the baby name site Nameberry and author of several books on choosing names, says the idea is worth keeping in mind. We may not have much power over our last names, but the first name “is one of the few things that you can actually choose about your child’s identity”, she says.
Like it or not, people make assumptions about who a Dennis or a Walter might be. And those assumptions can affect how others treat us, which in turn shapes our identity. All kinds of factors influence our choice of a name, Redmond says. “So why not be conscious of it?”