Do you love your name?

A seemingly ridiculous study seems to show that people whose names start with a C or D are more likely to make poor grades than people whose names start with A or B.

Also, baseball players whose name starts with K (the sign for strike-out) are more likely to strike out than those with other names.

The researchers say that it’s because people are subconsciously attracted to their names.

There are so many holes here that I don’t know where to start. How about the grades:

They seem to be judging by the GPA, rather than specific grades. In other words, maybe the Arthurs made straight As and the Davids made straight Bs. That would give the Davids a lower GPA without having a single D.

Also, the article says that people with A or B names actually didn’t do any better than the norm, but that the C and D names did worse. That being the case, is the theory just that C and D named people are in love with their names, but not the A and B people? Why?

And more. What about people who name their kids? Maybe they’re more likely to name the first-born with an A. I’m pretty sure that it’s been established that first-born kids do better in school, right?

Or the teachers doing the grading (as one of the comments to the post says). Maybe the teachers are the ones subconsciously making decisions based on names.

As far as the strike outs, why a K? I mean, that’s some weird subconscious mathematics to get to a strike-out from K. What about S names? Do they get more strikes? I doubt it, or they would have told us. And what about people with an H? Do they get more hits? Do the Es have more errors?

This just sounds like a Just So story.

I haven’t read the actual study yet, so I don’t know for sure. But it doesn’t sound like much.

Meanwhile, these studies seem to show that people tend to live in cities and work in jobs that share the same first letter as their names.

“Studies 1-5 showed that people are disproportionately likely to live in places whose names resemble their own first or last names (e.g., people named Louis are disproportionately likely to live in St. Louis). Study 6 extended this finding to birthday number preferences. People were disproportionately likely to live in cities whose names began with their birthday numbers (e.g., Two Harbors, MN). Studies 7-10 suggested that people disproportionately choose careers whose labels resemble their names (e.g., people named Dennis or Denise are overrepresented among dentists).”

[Link found in Seed magazine online]