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The BBC has an article about how a name can affect someone throughout their life. One table shows the chance of attending Oxford with a given name, and a graph shows the downward trend of naming children one of the top 50 most popular names.
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Nadia Comaneci, simple perfection.
-- '76 Olympics
(Score: 3, Interesting) by c0lo on Saturday April 12 2014, @12:32AM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 3, Interesting) by frojack on Saturday April 12 2014, @01:58AM
To this you have to add the revolving trends in names, as new trends come and old trends die.
Further, One could argue that the chances of attending oxford with a given name is inversely proportional to the number of people so named, and significant of absolutely nothing else.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 12 2014, @04:56AM
"children with unusual names may learn impulse control
I'm reminded of the other side of that coin.
A Boy Named Sue [google.com]
-- gewg_
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Saturday April 12 2014, @05:49AM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 1) by TGV on Saturday April 12 2014, @09:55AM
Learning impulse control? But that's relative to your socio-cultural environment. If you've got a black name, it will be considered normal in a black neighborhood; if you've got a white name, it'll be considered normal in white neighborhood. So any name can give the same amount of impulse control learning, given the correct environment. And that explanation does also not stretch to explaining why Eleanor is more often admitted at Oxford than Shannon. I'd say Conley is just making it up post hoc.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Saturday April 12 2014, @10:15AM
It may happen that the parents how'd chose Eleonore rather than Shannon have both higher expectations from theirs progeny and more clout to sustain those expectation - this one sounds plausible to me.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 1) by TGV on Saturday April 12 2014, @06:53PM
You referred to this reply in the thread below, but I fail to see anything else than correlation. If the mechanism is that parents translate their expectations into names and children behave according to this expectation, it doesn't make sense. Parents choose names based on all kinds of instincts. Children get named after famous people, family members, saints, etc., and to a great extent by fashion, and names get chosen before birth. How could that entail an expectation? That would only work if the child picked up that expectation based on its name, and not on the parents' behavior (because that would remove the name from the causal chain), and act according to the expectation that lives in the parents' association with that name.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Sunday April 13 2014, @12:12AM
The "isn't regurgitating statistics" doesn't necessarily imply "it provides explanations": for me, listing hypotheses and "don't know yet"-s was enough. My apologies if my comment title created higher expectations than I intended.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 1) by TGV on Sunday April 13 2014, @06:03AM
To me, an explanation along the lines of educated parents with expectations pick other names is already problematic, because even if there is a causal relation, it's more likely to be the parent's behavior rather than the name which affects the child. Let me put it this way: if everyone named their children Eleanor and and Peter, would everyone have a doctorate by the time the last Shane and Shannon die?
No need to be sorry, but remarkable claims require remarkable proof. I didn't see any. The claim that the effect comes from the name itself, and hence that a name has an almost magical power over the owner, is a remarkable claim, and not even the plain and simple possibility that the whole effect is just "post-hoc" is eliminated. So until there is an experiment where we measure the parents' expectations beforehand, and the test leaders assign a name to the child (that the parents obviously can't know), and then establish the influence of that name, there is no proof.
Sorry if I come across as strict in this. I've seen far too many flaky articles to accept that things just get published and take for true.