What's In A Name? An Individualist.

People with uncommon names are likely to be individualists, according to a study of Scandinavian names and behavior reported in The Economist 
(February 16, 2019). Those who left for America to pursue their own personal success when frosts ruined harvests in the 1860s were unlike those who stayed behind to marry and to spur the growth of labor unions at home. On the other hand, a study at Boston University found the U.S. western frontier was populated with immigrants who had rare names, learned English, and married outside their own nationalities.

     These findings reflect those Robert Plomin details in his new book, Blueprint: How DNA Makes Us Who We Are. (Also see the earlier post, "The 'Where Did I Come From?' Game.") Plomin's studies of twins reared together by the same parents and those raised separately by adopted parents blur the formerly accepted notion about the separate influences of what is inherited in an individual's nature and what the nurturing environment affects.

      Inherited physical characteristics, such as height, influence who people in the environment look up to as their leaders. Likewise, behavior traits a person inherits influence the same environmental reactions both natural and adopted parents have toward different individual children. Parents will read to children who inherit a desire to be read to, while a child who breaks the rules and marches to his or her own drummer may badger a parent to buy a musical instrument and take lessons in jazz.

     It seems those who bear unusual names: 1) inherited an individualistic temperament from the parents who named them, and 2) their individualistic behavior probably influenced parents and others in the environment to respond to them in positive and negative ways.

     Where individualistic behavior is valued, an unusual name could serve as a leading indicator of the right person for the job. The art world that welcomes innovation welcomed Salvador Dali the same way entertainment does Dolly Parton and Oprah; military strategy, Dwight Eisenhower and Ulysses S. Grant; human rights, Cady Stanton and Sojourner Truth; vehicle innovation, Elon Musk.

     Ambitious politicians, such as Kamala Harris, Marco Rubio, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Beto O'Rourke, and Cory Booker are looking at a mixed pro-con history of the environment's reactions to candidates with unusual names. Zachary Taylor and Barack Obama were successful; Horace Greeley and Adlai Stevenson were not.