Darker cells mean a higher score for this topic on that metric.
LessMore
Last reviewed Sources & creditsMedia creditsMethodology
Quick answers
Why do names matter if they are “just labels”?
Labels are how institutions and strangers find you. A name is a retrieval key for records, introductions and memory — social technology, not magic.
Did a résumé study really show name bias?
Yes. Bertrand and Mullainathan’s 2003 NBER paper (AER 2004) found U.S. callbacks differed for identical résumés labelled Emily/Greg versus Lakisha/Jamal.
Do names determine character?
No. Etymology and character charts are historical or folk systems. They describe culture; they do not predict a life.
Is a unique name always better?
Uniqueness can aid recall and also increase mispronunciation, teasing or form friction. Lieberson treated popularity as taste cycles, not virtue.
Why do governments care what you are called?
Civil registration, inheritance, taxation and travel documents need a stable identifier. That is administration, not aesthetics.
Are baby-name charts destiny maps?
Official files such as SSA, ONS and Statistics Korea count registrations. They are frequency data, not advice about who a child will become.
The useful voices are people who counted, experimented or historicised — not name-numerology entrepreneurs.
Read them as maps of a time and place. A U.S. résumé study is not a theory of Korean generation characters.
People
- Marianne Bertrand b. 1970 · Belgium / U.S. — Field experiment
Co-author of the Emily/Lakisha résumé study that made name-based callback gaps a standard citation.
- Sendhil Mullainathan b. 1973 · India / U.S. — Field experiment
Co-author of the same 2003/2004 audit; later work stays on how people use thin signals.
- Stanley Lieberson 1933–2018 · United States — Fashion theory
A Matter of Taste (2000) is the clearest argument that first names move like other fashions.
- Roland Fryer b. 1977 · United States — Name demography
With Steven Levitt, documented the late-20th-century rise of distinctively Black given names in U.S. data.
- Claudia Goldin b. 1946 · United States — Surnames & work
Historical work on family names and women’s labour-market identity shows how labels track institutions.
- Richard D. Alford 20th c. · United States — Ethnography
Naming and Identity surveyed how communities use names to place persons in social space.
Quote methods and years. Leave destiny vendors out of the bibliography.