Your name can affect your behaviour: Research

Know a dentist named Dennis? Have a friend Virginia in Virginia Beach? 

Name coincidences like these are not just funny, they are actually evidence of an influential psychological phenomenon called “implicit egotism,” that is the subject of a new PBS Digital Studios’ BrainCraft series “The Bizarre Ways Your Name Affects Your Behavior,” recently posted on YouTube. 

According to research on the concept, the letters of your name have been found to influence personal life decisions as significant as where you live, what you do for a living, even who you fall in love with.

"We write our names thousands of times throughout our lives," BrainCraft host and science reporter Vanessa Hill says in the segment. “The more we are merely exposed to something, like those letters, the more we like them.” And, the theory goes, the more you like something, the more you are drawn to it.

“Research on unconscious self-enhancement – or what we call implicit egotism – suggests that people’s positive automatic associations about themselves may influence their feelings about almost anything that people associate with the self,” write researchers Brett W. Pelham, Matthew C. Mirenberg, and John T. Jones of the State University of New York at Buffalo in their 2002 report, “Why Susie Sells Seashells by the Seashore: Implicit Egotism and Major Life Decisions,” published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

SOURCE: YAHOO