The So Re-name It Already Persistence Campaign
This post is part of my ongoing strategy to persist in writing about the re-naming of patient compliance until it annoys folks enough that a consensus on one name or another is reached, if for no other reason than to stop me blogging about it.
Today’s question: What are the likely consequences of a suboptimal or a distinctly inappropriate name?1
When Good Children Have Bad Names
Who worries more about the catastrophes of a bad name more than parents? Well, the kids with those weird names, of course, but my point is people take the naming of their progeny seriously. That the results are sometimes peculiar should perhaps be the first lesson in this parable. Taking naming too seriously means somebody gets named “Ima Hogg.”
Anyway, based on the premise that bad names are even more worrisome when applied to people than to phenomenon such as patient compliance, I thought a look at what happens when children are saddled with goofy names might be enlightening.
Today’s source of sane thinking is A Boy Named Sue, and a Theory of Names by J. Marion Tierney from the March 11, 2008 New York Times. I’ve excerpted the pertinent portions but the entire piece is short, accessible, and a worthwhile read.
During his 1969 concert at San Quentin prison, Johnny Cash proposed a paradigm shift in the field of developmental psychology. He used “A Boy Named Sue” to present two hypotheses:
1. A child with an awful name might grow up to be a relatively normal adult.
2. The parent who inflicted the name does not deserve to be executed.
… Studies showed that children with odd names got worse grades and were less popular than other classmates in elementary school. In college they were more likely to flunk out or become “psychoneurotic.” Prospective bosses spurned their résumés. They were overrepresented among emotionally disturbed children and psychiatric patients.
… Today, though, the case for Mr. Cash’s theory looks much stronger, and I say this even after learning about Emma Royd and Post Office in a new book, “Bad Baby Names,” by Michael Sherrod and Matthew Rayback.
By scouring census records from 1790 to 1930, Mr. Sherrod and Mr. Rayback discovered Garage Empty, Hysteria Johnson, King Arthur, Infinity Hubbard, Please Cope, Major Slaughter, Helen Troy, several Satans and a host of colleagues to the famed Ima Hogg (including Ima Pigg, Ima Muskrat, Ima Nut and Ima Hooker).
The authors also interviewed adults today who had survived names like Candy Stohr, Cash Guy, Mary Christmas, River Jordan and Rasp Berry. All of them, even Happy Day, seemed untraumatized.
“They were very proud of their names, almost overly proud,” Mr. Sherrod said. “We asked if that was a reaction to getting pummeled when they were little, but they said they didn’t get that much ribbing. They did get a little tired of hearing the same jokes, but they liked having an unusual name because it made them stand out.”
… But after I looked at experiments in the post-Sue era by revisionists like Kenneth Steele and Wayne Hensley, it seemed names weren’t so important after all.
When people were asked to rate the physical attractiveness and character of someone in a photograph, it didn’t matter much if that someone was assigned an “undesirable” name. Once people could see a face, they rated an Oswald, Myron, Harriet or Hazel about the same as a face with a “desirable” name like David, Gregory, Jennifer or Christine.
Other researchers found that children with unusual names were more likely to have poorer and less educated parents, handicaps that explained their problems in school. Martin Ford and other psychologists reported, after controlling for race and ethnicity, that children with unusual names did as well as others in school. The economists Roland Fryer and Steven Levitt reached a similar conclusion after controlling for socioeconomic variables in a study of black children with distinctive names.
“Names only have a significant influence when that is the only thing you know about the person,” said Dr. Ford, a developmental psychologist at George Mason University. “Add a picture, and the impact of the name recedes. Add information about personality, motivation and ability, and the impact of the name shrinks to minimal significance.”
… I sought an answer from Cleveland Kent Evans — not because he might have gotten into fights defending Cleveland, but because he’s a psychologist and past president of the American Names Society. Dr. Evans, a professor at Bellevue University in Nebraska, said there is evidence for the character-building theory from psychologists like Richard Zweigenhaft, but it doesn’t work exactly as Sue’s father imagined it.
“Researchers have studied men with cross-gender names like Leslie,” Dr. Evans explained. “They haven’t found anything negative — no psychological or social problems — or any correlations with either masculinity or effeminacy. But they have found one major positive factor: a better sense of self-control. It’s not that you fight more, but that you learn how to let stuff roll off your back.” …
Commentary
OK, I’m willing to stipulate that human beings and other phenomena are different and therefore the whatever principles govern the impact of a bad name for humans may not be applicable to names of other phenomenon.
On the other hand, there is little evidence that the field of patient compliance would look differently today if it had been called “adherence,” “concordance,” or “Jimmy Bob.”
And, certain principles, such as Dr. Ford’s notion that
names only have a significant influence when that is the only thing you know about the person. Add a picture, and the impact of the name recedes. Add information about personality, motivation and ability, and the impact of the name shrinks to minimal significance,
ring true and seem as though they might fit the naming of ideas as well as they do the naming of children.
In any case, there are enough similarities and parallels that it would seem that we should at least consider the possibility that even being stuck with a name with some possible negative aspects may not make all that much difference and get on with improving compliance (or whatever) already.
__________- For the purposes of this exercise, we’ll assume that “compliance” is a bad name, or that “compliance” has been replaced by “adherence” which is later discovered to be a bad name, or whatever term selected to designate the new compliance is revealed as bad.↩
