Does a Baby’s Name Determine Future Success?

I saw your answer about birth months and whether they correlate with a child being successful. What about names? My wife and I are anxious about choosing the wrong name, or a trendy name like Everleigh that’ll follow them for the rest of their life. Are we overthinking this? Does a child’s name at all impact their success in the future?

–Undecided

There is a surprising amount of research on this. As someone who is often left thinking I wish we knew more about this very important question in women’s health, I am surprised at the ink that has been spilled on the relationship between first names and various outcomes. A lot of this work is by economists.

I would say the general tenor of it is that simpler names are perceived more favorably. For example, this paper uses lab experiments to show that people hold more favorable views of names that are easy to pronounce. This paper shows that boys who have female-sounding names are more likely to have disciplinary infractions. And LinkedIn analyzed data from its site to show that CEOs tend to have short names. There is also a literature suggesting that employers could be learning about either race or socioeconomic status from first names and using that in their call-back decisions.

If you were really going to lean into this result, I suppose you’d want to go with a traditional name. Anne may ultimately have a higher likelihood of success than Everleigh. Having said that, all of the impacts here are very small, and names are a bit malleable. Nicknames are entirely possible!