Strange names likely screw with your kid’s future
Do unusual names really affect future outcomes for your children? A study out of the States by David E. Kalist and Daniel Y. Lee - First Names and Crime: Does Unpopularity Spell Trouble? - suggests that this might be true.
Their objective in the study:
We investigate the relationship between first name popularity and juvenile delinquency to test the hypothesis that unpopular names are positively correlated with crime.
The two sentence summary:
The distribution of first names in the state’s population is different from the names of juvenile delinquents. Our results show that unpopular names are positively correlated with juvenile delinquency for both blacks and whites.
They add, noting the correlation between socio-economic status of parents and the giving of lousy names:
First, as documented in the literature, parents of low socioeconomic status are more likely to give their children unpopular names, and a large theoretical literature links children living in low socioeconomic households with juvenile delinquency.
They quote this painful conclusion for those with kids named unusually, also providing their own interpretation.
Mehrabian and Piercy (1993) find that persons with unconventionally spelled names are perceived by others to have undesirable characteristics in terms of popularity, morality, warmth, and success. … …juveniles with unpopular names may be more prone to crime because they are treated differently by their peers, making it more difficult for them to form relationships.
So the simplest conclusion that you can make is that if you are of a low socio-economic status (read: poor) it would behoove you to provide your child with a good start by not giving them a crappy name. If you’re not poor, you might again want to think twice about giving your kids strange names regardless - just to be safe.
If this is solidly true then the Swedes might have experienced a better adjusted society since they used to aggressively legislate approved names. Now that this seems to be changing will Stockholm start to look like Alabama?
Thanks to the crew at Freakonomics for the link.
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