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Shakespeare — or more precisely, Juliet — was wrong in declaring, "A rose by any other name would smell as sweet."
Names have power. They are not like shirts you can change without changing you.
There is the many-times replicated letter-name effect, originally discovered more than two decades ago by J.M. Nuttin ("Narcissism beyond Gestalt and Awareness: The Name Letter Effect." European Journal of Social Psychology, 1985).
What's your favorite letter? Likely, it's a letter in your name.
In one study, Nuttin's subjects — both children and college students presented with pairs of letters — expressed a significant preference for letters that occur in their own names.
In a second study, he asked subjects to write down their six-most preferred letters from a randomly arranged alphabet. Again, there was a distinct preference for letters in their own names.
This finding held up among 12 different languages.
What we own — our name — we like.
It's no accident that Sally sells seashells — not ice-cold beer — by the seashore.
Our preference for our name, and its letters, is reflected in our choice of occupations and residences: A disproportionate number of dentists are named Dennis. Also, look for Charles to be living in Charlestown.
In my family, my wife, Linda, is a lawyer, and if we can go homophonically, Rosofsky is a writer. (Where psychologist came from, I don't know.)
Another line of research reveals that attractive/popular names affect our attitudes and expectations about their owners.
In the prototypical experiment, "Name Stereotypes and Teachers' Expectations," (Harari, Herbert and McDavid, John W. Journal of Educational Psychology, 65, 1973), teachers were given essays written by — unknown to the graders — fictionally named students. Students with attractive, i.e., popular names, such as David or Jennifer, received significantly higher grades than students with unpopular/unattractive names such as Boris or Olga. (Apologies to any Borises or Olgas out there.)
The attractiveness of a name is connected not only to the subjective grading of an essay but to scores on standardized tests. No need for an SAT prep course. Your good name is worth as many points — the idea being that your attractive name leads to high self-esteem, and high self-esteem yields achievement motivation.
So don't inflict a bad name on your child.
But if I were a job recruiter, I could do worse than hiring people with bad names who got good grades.
This is similar to my personal rule always to select — other things being equal — a female doctor or lawyer since, as the feminist law goes, "A woman has to work twice as hard to get half as far."
So does a bad name.
Achievement aside, names predict longevity. In a study of baseball players who died before 1950, the ones with positive initials, A.C.E., lived an average of 13 years longer than those with negative initials, D.E.D. (Abel E.L., and Kruger, M.L., "Symbolic significance of initials on longevity," Percept Mot Skills, Feb, 104, 1, 2007.)
If you are unfortunate enough to have an unfortunate looking baby, the right name could enhance her attractiveness. Amy Perfors, a researcher at M.I.T. posted pictures of 24 friends at HotorNot.com, a site where people are rated for attractiveness. She posted the photos twice with two different fictional names. Different names yielded different ratings.
For males, names with vowel sounds made at the front of the mouth, "e," or "i" were rated more attractive. For females, names that were round-sounding, like Laura, scored higher than names with smaller vowel sounds. ("What's in a Name? The Effect of Sound Symbolism on Facial Attractiveness." Presented at the 26th Annual Conference for Cognitive Science. Chicago, Illinois; Aug 7th, 2004.)
None of this means I'm going to select a dandelion over a rose when the wife's miffed at me — that is, as long as the rose remains named a rose.
Which brings us back to Shakespeare, and Juliet's mistake.
In the aptly named "A Rose by Any Other Name: Would it Smell as Sweet?" (J Neurophysiol 99: 386-393, 2008), Jelena Djordjevic and colleagues at McGill University and the Montreal Neurological Institute "examined whether presenting an odor with a positive, neutral, or negative name would influence how people perceive it."
They took 15 odors ranging from unpleasant to neutral to pleasant and presented them to subjects with names that were positive — "carrot juice," neutral--a two-digit number, and negative — "moldy vegetables."
Regardless of the odor — unpleasant, neutral, or pleasant — it was rated more pleasant when presented with a positive name, and less pleasant when presented with a negative name. Djordjevic didn't only depend on the word of the subjects. Measures such as skin conductance and heart rate showed arousal when an odor was presented with a positive name. And sniff volumes went up too. A positive name left them sniffing for more.
Perhaps we have mistakenly believed all these centuries that Shakespeare agreed with Juliet Capulet when he put the words about the rose in her mouth in Act II, Scene 2.
'Tis but thy name that is my enemy;
Thou art thyself, though not a Montague.
What's Montague? it is nor hand, nor foot,
Nor arm, nor face, nor any other part
Belonging to a man. O, be some other name!
What's in a name? that which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet;
So Romeo would, were he not Romeo call'd,
Retain that dear perfection which he owes
Without that title. Romeo, doff thy name,
And for that name which is no part of thee
Take all myself.
My humble literary analysis is that the balance of the play, as the bodies of people named Montague and Capulet pile high on the stage, is a refutation of your name being "no part of thee."
Click here to read the first chapter of my book, Nasty, Brutish, and Long: Adventures in Old Age and the World of Eldercare.
