People tend to have more positive feelings towards – and are more likely to comply with requests from – others who are similar to themselves in some way, even in superficial ways such as having similar-sounding names. But is it possible that our names can affect important, life-altering decisions, such as the type of career that we pursue or where we decide to live?

Research conducted by the behavioural scientist Brett Pelham and his colleagues suggests that the answer is yes. They claim that the tendency to favour things that we associate with our names does, in fact, have a subtle but powerful influence on major life decisions.

According to the researchers, there’s a reason why Susie chose a job in which she could sell seashells by the seashore and why Peter Piper went for a profession picking pecks of pickled pepper, not the other way around: people are attracted to professions with names similar to their own.

To test this idea, Pelham came up with a list of names that sounded like the word dentist, such as Dennis. According to census data, the name Dennis was the 40th most frequent male first name in the US population at the time, with the names Jerry and Walter ranking 39th and 41st respectively.

Armed with this information, Pelham searched the national directory of the American Dental Association, examining the number of dentists with one of those three first names. If people’s names have no effect whatsoever on the career path they follow, you’d expect there to be roughly equal numbers of people with these three names going into the field of dentistry.

But that’s not what Pelham and his colleagues found. The nationwide search revealed that 257 dentists were named Walter, 270 were named Jerry – and 482 were named Dennis.

This means that dentists are about 82 per cent more likely to be named Dennis than you’d expect if name similarity had absolutely no effect on career choice. Similarly, people whose names begin with Geo (eg, George, Geoffrey) are disproportionately likely to do research in the geosciences (eg, geology).

In fact, even the first letter of a person’s name influences his or her career choice. For example, the researchers found that owners of hardware stores are about 80 per cent more likely to have names that start with the letter H than with the letter R, but roofers are about 70 per cent more likely to have names that start with R than with H.

Of course, if you were to ask, say, a thousand roofers whose names begin with R whether their names played any role whatever in the career they chose, it’s highly likely that half of them would see you as crazy and the other half as stupid.

It turns out that the tendency to be drawn to things that are associated with ourselves plays out in other important areas of life, including where we decide to live. To cite just a few of their findings, Pelham and his colleagues have shown that, at a disproportionate rate:

— People move to states that have names similar to their own names. For example, people called Florence are disproportionately likely to move to Florida, and people named Louise are disproportionately likely to move to Louisiana.

— People move to cities with numbers in them that match the numbers in their dates of birth. For example, cities with the number 2 in their names, such as Two Harbors, Minnesota, have a disproportionate number of residents who were born on February 2 (2/2), whereas cities that have the number 3 in their names, such as Three Forks, Montana, have a disproportionate number of residents who were born on March 3 (3/3).

— People choose to live on streets with names that match their own. In other words, someone named Washington is more likely to choose to live on Washington Street than is someone named Jefferson.

— People choose to marry others who have similar-sounding first or last names to theirs. All else being roughly equal, if Eric, Erica, Charles and Charlotte all meet one another for the first time, Erica is more likely to become romantically involved with Eric than with Charles, and with Charlotte the reverse is true.

— When asked to trust their feelings and intuition, people generally prefer products with names that begin with the same letter as the initial letter of their own name. So someone named Arielle, say, might be more likely to put the chocolate bar Aero towards the top of her list than someone named Larry would – he’d be more likely to favour a Lion Bar.

© Robert B. Cialdini, Steve Martin and Noah Goldstein 2007

Extracted from YES! Fifty Secrets from the Science of Persuasion, to be published by Profile Books on November 12, 2007, at £8.99, available from Times BooksFirst at £8.54, free p&p. 0870 1608080

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