Drunk Tank Pink: And Other Unexpected Forces That Shape How We Think, Feel, and Behave Read online

  So, what would happen if you could turn back the clock and rename a child who was given a typically black name with a typically white name instead? Would the child’s life be any different? Short of building a time machine, there’s no way to test this conjecture in its purest form, but two economists have done the next best thing. They wondered whether two job applicants who were identical, except for the blackness or whiteness of their names, might inspire different responses from firms that advertised positions online. The researchers responded to five thousand job ads in Boston and Chicago and varied two features of the attached résumés: their quality (some were strong and others were weak), and the blackness or whiteness of the names (some were typically white names and others were typically black names). It’s no surprise that the stronger résumés yielded more callbacks, but names also had a marked effect. Emilys, Annes, Brads, and Gregs fared better than Aishas, Kenyas, Darnells, and Jamals, even when their applications were identical on every important indicator of applicant strength. In fact, fictional applicants with white names received callbacks on 10 percent of their applications, whereas applicants with black names received callbacks on only 6.5 percent of their applications—a 50 percent difference. Put another way: on average, white applicants only need to send out ten applications to get a single callback, but black applicants need to send out fifteen for the same outcome. Also disturbing was the finding that a stronger application helped white applicants but did very little to improve the prospects of black applicants. Whereas employers rewarded stronger white applicants with 27 percent more callbacks than weaker white applicants, stronger black applicants received only 8 percent more callbacks than weaker black applicants (and 27 percent fewer even than weak white applicants). It’s impossible to get a job without clearing the first hurdle, so these results bode ill for the state of racial bias in a society that some pundits describe as “post-racial.”

  If the damaging stereotypes that produced these disturbing results vanished, would names lose their power to shape important life outcomes? The Voronins must have believed so when they named their son BOHdVF260602, a name chosen because it was free of the usual demographic baggage. As it turns out, the Voronins were addressing only part of the issue. Our own names influence us even in the absence of other people. According to Belgian psychologist Jozef Nuttin’s classic account, people feel a sense of ownership over their names. People tend to like what belongs to them, so Nuttin found that people preferred the letters that populated their names more than the letters that were absent from their names. In one study, Nuttin asked two thousand people who spoke one of twelve different languages to choose the six letters they liked most from their language’s written alphabet—the letters they found most attractive without investing much thought in the process. Across the twelve languages, people circled their own name letters 50 percent more often than they circled name-absent letters. So, had Jozef Nuttin completed the study himself, he would have been 50 percent more likely to circle the letter Z than would have a fictitious Josef Nuttin, for whom Z would not have held special personal meaning.

  The magnetic attraction we feel toward our name letters contributes to a range of surprising outcomes. People donate to charities for all sorts of reasons: because they have a personal link to the cause, because it tugs at their heartstrings, and sometimes because they honestly believe the cause deserves their support. These rationales are easy to defend, but psychologists have shown that people tend to donate more often and more generously to causes that share their initials. The researchers examined Red Cross donation records following seven catastrophic Atlantic Ocean hurricanes that hit the United States between 1998 and 2005. There’s no natural shorthand for referring to tropical storms, so the National Hurricane Center has labeled each tropical storm since the 1950s with a proper name. As you might expect based on the name-letter effect, people are drawn to hurricanes that share their initials. For example, people with K names donated 4 percent to all disasters before Katrina devastated New Orleans in 2005, but 10 percent of all Katrina donations came from K-named people, a 150 percent increase. You might be wondering whether people named Katrina, Kate, Katherine, Katie, or any other “Kat” names were responsible for the change. They weren’t; the effect was just as strong when those people who shared more than just the first letter with Katrina were removed from the analysis. The same results were true for a range of hurricanes.

  For each of the seven hurricanes examined, the proportion of Red Cross donations from people whose names shared the hurricane’s initial increased immediately after the hurricane. For example, M-named people made up 30 percent more of the donor population during the two-month period after Mitch devastated Honduras and Nicaragua in 1998 than during the six-month period before the hurricane struck.

  The positive association we have with our names explains most name-letter effects, but sometimes our initials also inspire thoughts and behaviors that arise through force of habit. One of the major differences between people with A surnames and people with Z surnames is where those names fall on default alphabetical lists. For better or worse, teachers often call on students with A surnames before they call on students with B surnames, and so on through the alphabet till the Zahns, Zolas, and Zuckermans are called on last. Some teachers are sensitive to this issue, so they occasionally start at the bottom of the alphabet—but more often than not, they begin with A and end with Z. In a series of clever studies, two psychologists tested the idea that people whose family names were at the end of the alphabet might respond more quickly to scarce opportunities than their beginning-of-the-alphabet counterparts. Since people with N–Z names habitually wait behind people with A–M names, the researchers guessed that N-to-Zers might be chronically quicker to respond to limited opportunities because they so often have to wait for their turn. That’s exactly what they found when they offered a limited number of free basketball tickets to a group of graduate students. The later the students’ family names in the alphabet, the quicker they were to respond. In another study, the researchers found that PhD students with later-letter names were quicker to post their job-search materials online than were students with earlier-letter names. In fact, the students who posted their materials during the first three weeks had an average family-name letter of M (the twelfth letter), whereas students who posted their materials after the first three weeks had elapsed had an average family-name letter of G (the seventh letter). This last-name effect, as the researchers call it, illustrates just one more way that names subtly influence our lives.

  Names, then, have the capacity to shape our outcomes because they’re tied to important concepts that have real meaning. Sometimes they’re associated with racial groups or socioeconomic status, sometimes with charity appeals or being called on last at school. Some of those associations are positive and others are negative, and when you’re a parent faced with a smorgasbord of choices, perhaps it’s worth considering those associations when breaking the tie among several equally liked names.

  Fairchild vs. Pucinski: The Smoothly Fluent vs. the Awkwardly Disfluent

  When parents name their children, they’re also faced with a second implied choice: a simple, smooth, common name or a complex but unique name. The choice isn’t easy, because folk wisdom rewards both approaches. No one’s going to mispronounce the names Tom, Tim, Todd, and Ted, but people named Tom, Tim, Todd, and Ted are a dime a dozen. Meanwhile, people named T-ah (pronounced “Tadasha”), Thyra (is it Theera, Thigh-ra, or Tie-ra?), and Taiven (Tay-ven, or Ty-ven?) stand out in a crowd, but the crowd might ignore them because no one’s sure how to pronounce their names. (On this count, perhaps BOHdVF260602’s parents were less successful.) Independently of what they mean or imply, some names are easy to pronounce; they glide off the tongue with ease and sound innately and effortlessly appealing. Other names are hard to pronounce; they challenge your brain before challenging your tongue, teeth, and lips, and when they eventually emerge, you’re not sure you’
ve pronounced them correctly after all. Psychologists who study the linguistic properties of these names call the ones that are easy to pronounce fluent, and the ones that are difficult to pronounce disfluent. If you’re trying to decide how fluent a name is, imagine that you’re presenting the Oscar for best foreign-language film. You open the envelope and announce, “The Oscar goes to . . .” Some foreign names are very difficult to pronounce for uninitiated English-speakers, but others are easier to pronounce because they’re shorter, or share sounds and letter combinations that are common to the English language, or because they feature simpler letter strings. In 1996, the Oscar-winning foreign-language film was Kolya, a Czech film produced by Jan . Kristin Scott Thomas and Jack Valenti, the category’s English-speaking presenters, must have practiced hard before announcing the Georgian nominee, Shekvarebuli kulinaris ataserti retsepti, directed by Nana Dzhordzhadze. (Actually, many of the films adopt English titles so the presenters don’t mar the event with botched pronunciations. In this case, the film was retitled A Chef in Love, though Dzhordzhadze’s name must have presented its own challenges.)

  The most obvious consequence of having a disfluent name is that your parents have invited a lifetime of misspelling and mispronunciation on your behalf. We’re all capable of laughing off the occasional error, but sometimes errors have serious consequences. When lesser-known or last-minute candidates enter a political race, their names don’t always appear on the ballot form; instead, voters are asked to write the candidate’s name by hand, or type the name using a machine that recognizes each candidate’s name. Candidates like George Bush and Bill Clinton may have emerged from a write-in vote unscathed, but Texan house majority candidate Shelley Sekula-Gibbs had less luck in 2006. For starters, some voting machines can’t process hyphens, so Sekula-Gibbs became Sekula Gibbs. But the real trouble began when the machines had to be programmed to process misspellings. A bipartisan committee was formed, eventually sanctioning twenty-eight pages of misspellings, from the understandable Kelly Segula-Gibbs to the perplexing one-word entry ShelleySkulaGibbsssss.

  Sekula-Gibbs escaped relatively unharmed, but two heavily favored candidates in the 1986 Illinois Democratic primary for lieutenant governor were less fortunate. George Sangmeister and Aurelia Pucinski were touted to trounce upstarts Mark Fairchild and Janice Hart. The pundits ignored the fact that many voters know little about their favored candidates’ policy positions and rely instead on irrelevant cues when breaking a tie. On the naming front, pitting the foreign-sounding Sangmeister and Pucinski against the made-for-politics Fairchild and Hart is no more balanced than an arm-wrestling contest between a small child and Mike Tyson. With heavyweight names like Fairchild and Hart, the two underdog candidates swept the race despite their weaker résumés. One voter who was interviewed in the New York Times even admitted to voting for Fairchild and Hart “because they had smooth-sounding names.” A team of psychologists ran a study that proved the importance of the two names: when mock voters were asked to choose between two candidates based only on their names—George Sangmeister and Mark Fairchild—an overwhelming majority preferred Fairchild. Since most voters knew little about the candidates when they approached the ballot box, it seems fair to assume that at least some of them were swayed by the candidates’ names.

  It’s important to note that these four names differed along other dimensions apart from name fluency, including foreignness and their overlap with appealing English words like heart and child. These differences mark this anecdote as an interesting but less than ideal test of the effect of name fluency on meaningful outcomes. Along with two psychologists at the University of Melbourne, Australia, Simon Laham and Peter Koval, I ran similar analyses that were designed to eliminate the possibility that these effects are driven entirely by the foreignness of disfluent names. We began with the premise that fluent names should act like halos, making the name’s owner just slightly more attractive than a fictional similar person with a disfluent name. To test that hypothesis, we examined the relationship between the fluency of five hundred lawyers’ names and their positions on the legal hierarchy (from associate to partner). We harvested those names from ten different U.S. law firms that varied in size and prominence, and asked a group of American adults to rate each name according to how easy it was to pronounce, and how likely its owner was to be foreign.

  The results were equal parts fascinating and disconcerting: lawyers with fluent names seemed to ascend the law firm hierarchy more often and more rapidly than their disfluently named colleagues. The result couldn’t be explained by foreignness, because the effect held when we confined the analysis to lawyers with foreign names, and again when we confined the analysis to lawyers with typical Anglo-American names. A closer look at the data tells the tale. Name fluency doesn’t help every lawyer equally, because it’s not a miracle-maker. You could be the smartest lawyer with the smoothest name, but if you’re a rookie who’s just emerged from the womb of law school, you’re not going to make partner. (Not a single lawyer who’d been employed for fewer than four years was a partner.) The same holds for veterans: by the time you’ve been practicing for three decades, your ability will speak for itself—and most veterans (89 percent) were partners perhaps by virtue of longevity alone. But the effect is strong among mid-career lawyers: after 4–8 years in practice, 12 percent of those with fluent names (names rated 1 on a 5-point pronunciation difficulty scale—half of all lawyers in the sample) were partners, whereas only 4 percent of their counterparts with disfluent names (those whose names were rated at 2–5 on the same scale) were partners. The gap holds when you look at slightly more experienced lawyers; after 9–15 years, 74 percent of the lawyers with fluent names were partners, but only 67 percent of those with disfluent names were partners. Quite literally, then, it pays to give your newborn future attorney as simple a name as possible.

  This graph shows the mid-career advantage of having a fluent name. Compared with lawyers who have disfluent names, lawyers with fluent names are 8 percent more likely to be partners four to eight years after graduating, and 7 percent more likely to be partners nine to fifteen years after graduating.

  There’s a potent moral to the story I’ve told so far: you’re unlikely to be celebrated for having a creative name, but that same creative (and therefore disfluent) name may prime you for negative attention and negative outcomes. It’s easy to sympathize with exuberant parents who celebrate the miracle of new life by naming that miracle Keirraih, but when young Keirraih starts school and then work, she’s likely to be a magnet for negative attention.

  Just as wise parents name their biological offspring with care, wise entrepreneurs choose names for their commercial offspring carefully. Even company names that seem innocuous at first have the potential to give their parents heartburn. In one striking case, the inoffensively named Experts Exchange, an online technology problem-solving company, exposed itself to mockery when it chose the web address www.expertsexchange.com. (The address is now www.experts-exchange .com, and the company has resolved the ambiguity in its favor by choosing the strategically capitalized Twitter handle ExpertsExchange.)

  Beyond the obvious dangers of choosing a name with unintended double meaning, the same fluency effects that shape how quickly lawyers rise to partnership seem to also shape the fortunes of fledgling financial stocks. With my colleague Danny Oppenheimer, a psychology professor at Princeton University, I discovered that young financial stocks tend to perform better on the markets when their names are easier to pronounce. Choosing among stocks that are just about to enter the market is very difficult, because there’s so much information to sift through, and none of it predicts the stock’s future performance perfectly. A stock with a simpler, fluent name will tend to rise above its disfluently named counterparts for the same reason that a fluently named person might attract law-firm promotions: stock purchasing is inherently risky, and fluency inspires a sense of comfort and familiarity that tempers the inescapable fact th
at even low-risk stocks sometimes go bust. To test the effect of name fluency on stock performance, we measured the performance of nearly one thousand stocks across the New York Stock Exchange and the American Stock Exchange markets from 1990 to 2004.

  In one study, we asked a group of people to imagine they were reading the names of each company at an awards ceremony (the fluency litmus test I described earlier), and to indicate how easy or difficult it would be to pronounce the company’s name. On one end of the spectrum were fluently named companies like Belden Inc., and on the other end were disfluently named companies like Magyar Tavkozlesi Részvénytársaság (a Hungarian telecommunications company). Not all the disfluent stocks were foreign-owned, and the effect held even when we looked only at American stocks with typically American names. As we expected, the stocks with fluent names fared better than those with disfluent names, especially during their first week in the market. In fact, if you’d invested $1,000 in the ten most fluently named stocks between 1990 and 2004, you’d have come away with $1,153 after just one week, a whopping 11 percent return on your initial investment. In contrast, if you’d invested the same $1,000 in the ten most disfluently named stocks across the same period, you’d come away with just $1,040, a much smaller 4 percent return on your investment.