Nominative determinism goes respectable…
AS READERS know all too well, this column has extensively documented the phenomenon of nominative determinism, the tendency of people to gravitate towards areas of work that fit their surname. Now new areas of nominative investigation have been opened up in a paper entitled “Why Susie sells seashells by the seashore: Implicit egotism and major life decisions” (Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, vol 82, p 469).
On the assumption that “people prefer things that are connected to the self (for example, the letters in one’s name)”, authors Brett Pelham, Matthew Mirenberg and John Jones found people are “disproportionately likely to…
