Names and Behavior
By H. Edward Deluzain
In the article "Names and Personality," the point was made that our
self-concepts function much like scripts that we act out in our day-to-day
contact with other people. To put this idea another way, the way we see
ourselves behaving is more or less the way we do behave in any given
situation. According to this line of thinking, because names can have an
effect on self-concept, names can indirectly influence how we act. However,
research into the ways names affect people has uncovered a link that shows
that our names--or at least other people's reactions to our
names--influence the way we behave even more directly.
One of the classic pieces of research on the relationship between names
and behavior was conducted in Africa by G. Johoda of University College
of the Gold Coast. In discussions with teachers and social workers on the
formation of character in young people, Jahoda discovered that the people
he was working with--all of whom were Ashanti--sincerely believed that
the day of the week on which a person was born has a lot to do with the
kind of character traits and behavior the person will show throughout life.
Specifically, Jahoda learned that the Ashanti believe that boys (but
apparently not girls) who are born on Monday will be mild mannered and
peace loving, but those born on Wednesday will be violent and aggressive.
By itself, the superstition that the day of the week of a person's birth
has some sort of magical power over the person is not all that uncommon
around the world. In fact, as Christopher Anderson points out in The Name
Game, we have a popular nursery rhyme in our own culture that expresses
more or less the same idea:
Monday's child is fair of face, Tuesday's child is full of grace;
Wednesday's child is full of woe, Thursday's child has far to go; Friday's
child is loving and giving, Saturday's child works hard for a living; But
the child that is born on the Sabbath day, Is bonny, and blithe, and good,
and gay.
Even though this superstition may be widespread, the point that aroused
Jahoda's curiosity about the ashanti version of it was the fact that some
of the best educated and most sophisticated members of the Ashanti
community were so convinced that it was true that they were willing to
use the idea in serious academic discussion to explain how character
develops. Apparently they had seen enough evidence of how people born on
Monday and Wednesday behaved to convince them that the superstition was
fact.
When he looked into the matter further, Jahoda learned that the Ashanti
were keenly aware of the day of the week they were born on because one
of their customs dictated that the day name be included in the person's
name, along with any other names given at birth. Thus, Ashanti boys born
on Monday or Wednesday knew they were born on one of those days because
the Ashanti equivalent of Monday or Wednesday was part of their names.
Unlike most Americans, who are either unaware of the day of the week of
their birth or unconcerned about it, the Ashanti had the information
constantly called to their attention.
Jahoda's research took the form of reviewing the records of the local
juvenile court to see if any pattern emerged that would confirm the local
belief. The results were rather striking. In the five-year period that
the court records covered, 13.5% of the boys referred to the juvenile
authorities had Wednesday as part of their names. When the offenses were
analyzed, it turned out that these boys were responsible for almost 22%
of all the violent acts recorded by the court. The number of violent acts
committed by the boys born on Wednesday was significantly higher than
would be expected through mere chance, and it showed that Wednesdays
tended to live up to the reputation. As for the boys born on Monday, they
made up on 6.9% of all the juvenile delinquents. When this figure was
compared to the number of Mondays in the population (about 13%), it bore
out the superstition that boys born on that day would lead more peaceful
and law-abiding lives.
Jahoda concluded from all this that there was nothing magical about the
day of the week the boys were born on. Instead, the behavior of the boys
named Monday or Wednesday was the result of the expectations the culture
had for them, expectations that were reinforced and brought to mind by
parents, teachers, school friends, and others every time their names were
mentioned. Mondays were expected to be good and were; Wednesdays were
expected to be bad and were, also (Jahoda).
At the time this experiment was conducted, the results had some important
implications for psychology because, until then, there was very little
support for the idea that people, especially children, tend to live up
to what is expected of them. However, the study has ever greater
significance for an understanding of how names affect human behavior
because names played such an important part among the Ashanti in
communicating expectations to the individual. Had the Ashanti boys born
on Wednesday not been named Wednesday, it is doubtful that the belief about
how they were supposed to behave would have had any more effect on them
than the "Monday's child" nursery rhyme has on us. But they were named
Wednesday, and every time they heard the superstition they knew it was
supposed to apply to them. Furthermore, every time a person named
Wednesday got into a fight, the rest of the community was reinforced in
thinking that the superstition about people named Wednesday was correct.
The process at work among the Ashanti is part of the psychological
phenomenon of stereotyping, in which names often play an important part.
Stereotyping is certainly not limited to the Ashanti, of course; in fact,
we engage in it constantly, both as perpetrator and victim. Nor does
stereotyping always cause negative or socially undesirable
behavior--after all, the Ashanti boys born on Monday were stereotyped just
as much as those born on Wednesday. Nevertheless, stereotyping on the
basis of a name does mean that our names have direct influence over how
we act.
The process that gives names their influence is the so-called
self-fulfilling prophecy. Briefly explained, the self-fulfilling
prophecy works this way. A man introduces himself to us as Percy.
Immediately, our unconscious mind goes to work dredging up all the images
and associations we have with that name. Without realizing it, we develop
a mental picture--a set of expectations--of what a Percy is like. This
mental picture causes changes in our own behavior that are so subtle that
we are not aware of them. However, Percy picks up on the messages we are
sending by our actions, and he makes unconscious changes in his own way
of acting to satisfy what he thinks we expect of him. In other words, we
set up a situation which forces Percy to behave the way we think Percys
are supposed to behave.
This process does not necessarily occur in every chance encounter or
casual meeting, although it very well can happen under these circumstances.
However, it does occur sometimes in long-term relationships, especially
those involving people on different status levels, such as a
foreman-worker or teacher-student relationship. A major research study
conducted in schools pointed this out.
The study in question was conducted by Robert Rosenthal and Lenore
Jacobson in the late 1960's. The researchers told a group of teachers that
their classes contained a number of children who had the ability to do
well in their studies if they were given a little extra encouragement.
The classes were made up of ordinary groups of students assigned at random,
but the teachers were led to set high expectations for them on the basis
of what they had been told. At the end of the term, the results of tests
indicated that a significant number of students learned more that year
than would ordinarily be expected during a single school term. In effect,
the prophecy of high achievement fulfilled itself (Rosenthal and
Jacobson).
The point at issue in Rosenthal and Jacobson's experiment was not names,
but the same principle applied in their research as applied to the Ashanti,
where names did play a part. The insight into the self-fulfilling prophecy
has been used in research on the effects of names on the way children
perform in school, with some rather startling results.
Two investigators who made use of this insight were Herbert Harari and
John W. McDavid. They were aware from previous studies that the "more
common names are regarded as generally more attractive, and they connote
more favorable stereotypes. In contrast, the rare and unusual names are
deemed less socially attractive and they connote negative stereotypes"
(Harari and McDavid). They decided to test out the effects these facts
would have on how teachers grade students' essays by giving a group of
eighty experienced teachers eight essays--four written by girls and four
by boys--and asking the teachers to mark them. The essays were all of
roughly the same quality, and the only identification on them was a first
name and a bogus last initial. The boys' names used were David, Elmer,
Hubert, and Michael, and the girls' names were Adelle, Bertha, Karen, and
Lisa. The eight essays were all on different subjects, so Harari and
McDavid took the precaution of mixing up the names and essays. In other
words, in one teacher's packet the essay about Tarzan had the name David
on it, while in another packet the name David was on the essay about kites.
Before starting their work, the researchers predicted that papers
attributed to children with common, popular names would get the higher
scores, and among the boys, at least, their prediction was correct. Papers
"written" by David got the highest marks, those by Michael the second
highest, those by Elmer the third highest, and those by Hubert the lowest.
The girls' papers were ranked somewhat differently than Harari and McDavid
had predicted: those by Adelle got the highest marks, followed by papers
by Lisa, Karen, and Bertha, in that order. If the prediction had been
perfectly accurate, Adelle would have followed Lisa and Karen. However,
Harari and McDavid pointed out that the name Adelle has a strong stereotype
of "scholarly" associated with it, and this stereotype may have been too
strong for teachers to resis as they graded the essays.
In order to make sure that their conclusion about names influencing the
teachers' grading was correct, Harari and McDavid repeated the experiment
using eighty undergraduate psychology students as graders. The data from
this group showed no pattern whatsoever, and this confirmed the original
idea that there was nothing about the essays themselves or the way in which
the experiment was conducted that biased the results. Instead, the
experienced teachers had developed definite positive attitudes toward
children with more popular names over the years, and they unconsciously
favored these children as they graded their papers (Harari and McDavid).
Harari and McDavid were followed by others who confirmed their findings
and added details to the information they had gathered. In a sense, Harari
and McDavid's work was done under "laboratory" conditions--the teachers
were real enough, of course, but the students were fictitious and the
experiment was set up with a particular end-product in mind. The question
of whether similar results could be found among "real" students in "real"
schools remained open. The first answer came from Gary Garwood in the
experiment described in the essay "Names and Personality."
Garwood had a group of seventy-nine teachers rate boys' names as desirable
or undesirable. Then he compared academic achievement scores for a group
of boys with desirable names to a group with undesirable names, and he
discovered that the average score for the group with desirable names was
almost twice as high as the average for the group with undesirable names.
Garwood concluded, with considerable understatement, that, "Teachers,
for the most part, are the arbitrators of what is success and what is
failure in our schools. Most teachers probably believe that their
interactions with students are fair and unbiased and that their
evaluations of students are based only on merit. This is perhaps as
idealistic stance . . ." (Garwood).
Garwood's research was followed by a study by Thomas Busse and Louisa
Seraydarian of Temple University. They found the same kind of relationship
between desirable names and school achievement that Garwood found, but
they went a step further and discovered a positive relationship between
desirability of names and IQ (Busse and Seraydarian).
The combined impact of the findings of Harari, McDavid, Garwood, Busse,
and Seraydarian is as startling as the implications are frightening. To
be sure, names are only one of a host of personal attributes which are
subject to stereotyped reactions, and the extent of the importance of
names, as compared to such personal factors as hair color, body shape,
physical attractiveness, etc., has not yet been fully explored. However,
one thing is clear: names, or at least teachers' reactions to name
stereotypes, do have an influence on how children perform in school.
Given this information about teachers' reactions to names, we can
logically assume that the same type of reactions occur in people in other
professions and in similar supervisory relationships. Teachers and
students happen to be relatively easy groups to study, and the relevant
dependent variables (e.g., IQ scores, achievement test scores, etc.) are
easy for researchers to access. As a result, these groups tend to be
investigated more than others. However, as the example of the Ashanti
illustrated, stereotyping and the self-fulfilling prophecy are by no
means limited to the academic world. So, until research results are
available, we can only wonder how many people fail to receive promotions
in the military or on the assembly line because of their names. We can
only speculate about how many sales are lost or promising political
careers are never gotten off the ground because of a name.
Works Cited
Busse, Thomas V. and Louisa Seraydarian. "The Relationship Between First
Name Desirability and School Readiness, IQ, and School Achievement."
Psychology in the Schools 15 (1978): 297-302.
Harari, Herbert and John W. McDavid. "Name Stereotypes and Teachers'
Expectations." Journal of Educational Psychology 65 (1973): 222-225.
Jahoda, G. "A Note on Ashanti Names and Their Relationship to
Personality." British Journal of Psychology 45 (1954): 192-195.
Rosenthal, Robert and Lenore Jacobson. Pygmalion in the Classroom:
Teacher Expectation and Pupils' Intellectual Development. New York: Holt,
Rinehart and Winston, 1968.
Copyright ©1996 by H. Edward Deluzain. Permission is hereby granted to
print this file and to disseminate it in hard copy or online, provided
it is not changed in any way.