Your Name Is a Psychological Experiment

The curse of being a Fagan

My wife and I are expecting a baby boy in June. It’s become an all-consuming psychological experiment in person branding.

What on earth do we call him?

All my excellent suggestions - Sebastian, Napoleon, Hawk Tuah - have been shot down. So now I’m asking myself: what is in a name?

Would a rose by any other name smell as sweet? Maybe. What if it were called ‘the shitstalker’? I suspect not. Names matter - they frame our perceptions, change expectations, and influence outcomes.

There’s a psychological phenomenon for it - nominative determinism - the idea that your name subtly nudges your destiny. For example:

• People named Dennis or Denise are statistically more likely to become dentists.

• People are more likely to marry those with names similar to their own (e.g., Patrick and Jasmine - 7 letters, two syllables, a and i).

• Louise is more likely to live in St Louis.

These have been found in actual peer-reviewed studies. Though inevitably, some follow the science Redditor will waddle into my LinkedIn comments and say, ‘Um actually it’s been debunked.’ Oh has it? Has it really?

When was the last time you met an Adolf?

This is the problem with the science types. They treat science like religion. One meta-analysis to rule them all, one p-value to find them, and that’s it. No need for common sense or experience - just outsource your thinking to SPSS.

But the half-life of a fact in psychology is about seven years. (Check that, please.) That means every seven years, half of what we thought we knew about psychology gets quietly put out to pasture. So if something can be debunked, can’t the debunking also be debunked? Isn’t that just science doing what it does - flailing around in the dark and occasionally bumping into the truth?

Back to names - ‘Donald Trump’ literally means ‘triumphant world leader’. Imagine if his name had been Nigel Gubbins. Do you think he’d have ended up in the White House, or would he be managing a branch of Carpetright in Reading?

Even my own name has destiny coded into it. Patrick Fagan: Patriarch of Pagans. Lord of the Heathens. A man destined to raise eyebrows at dinner parties and mutter, ‘So we could send men to play golf and drive little go-karts on the moon sixty years ago but we can’t go back with all the technology we have today because we forgot how?’ into his peas.

It’s fascinating that peasants were non-believers, that luxury beliefs ruled supreme, all the way back then. Misinformation super-spreaders who said the Earth moved around the sun or the Pope was a man like everyone else - commoners.

Is my name me, or am I me in spite of it? If I changed it to something else - Patrick Kennedy? Patrick Belmont? Patrick Strongcock? - would I morph into a different version of myself? Would I be less misbelieving?

And then there’s my son. Our first we called Sonny Cambridge, so he’d be happy and smart. So far so good. But now, second boy incoming, we’re struggling.

You can’t call your son Neville Longbottom and expect him to grow up as anything other than a slightly awkward hero with tight trousers. Meanwhile Draco Malfoy sounds like someone who’s been arrested for insider trading and hexing a Romanian au pair.

And if names didn’t matter, why not just call your kid XAE12-420? Why bother naming brands, or films, or anything? Why not rename Burger King to Burger Pleb and see how sales go?

So yes, nominative determinism might be ‘debunked’ in some statistical review. But in real life - in the realm of intuition and common sense - it’s alive and well. And frankly, I trust my gut more than a meta-analysis.

Especially when my gut is saying, don’t call your son Hawk Tuah.

Name suggestions, please.