That's a horrible name for that article because it suggests the names are causative.
Probably a name can and will influence behaviours, but such studies are riddled with problems. First there could be a problem with statistics - if you compared names to criminal records on a group of people, the chances are you would see a pattern even if names and criminal records were completely independent. That's because randomness creates patterns. To avoid patterns from randomness, you need a
lot of samples - so a lot of people - but of course there are more Thomases and Lisas than there are Brohms and Gandalfs, so then some names may still be slightly vulnerable for random effects in the study and how do you compare a name which only belongs to 10 people compared to one which belongs to 1000? You might take out a random 10 out of those 1000 so that the amount is more comparable, but then you could get random effect problems again.
The people doing such studies are likely aware and good at that sort of stuff and can probably deal with those kind of problems, but then you have the bigger problem of hidden variables. How many caucasian white people in the US are called Kareem or Tyrell? Names are not evenly "dispersed" over the population. F.ex some ethnic groups will like some while another ethnic groups will gravitate towards others. Factors, hidden variables, which stem from these differences may seep into the names study and make it seem like the names are causal of the social characteristics.
The people studying this are probably aware of this as well so I think the biggest problems / misunderstandings come from journalists getting their grubby hands and thoughts over studies like these
I mean, one of the main researchers from the study seems to think names are not causal (just correlate with other things that are), but that didn't stop the moron who wrote up the article from calling it "Odd names turn boys bad"
Shows real stupidity and a lack of respect to the researchers in my opinion!
I Just Realized Something..
) I did a study on something a little similar to this in sociology and what we found was that it wasn't the names that specifically led to bad behaviour. You had to look at class (touchy subject, I know, but I've started now). If you look at things broadly, generally speaking crime is commited mostly by people of a 'lower class'. I know there are exceptions to every rule, but as I said, this is generally speaking. What we found when we studied this was that a different class of people call their children a different class of name (again, exceptions to a rule, broadly speaking). So, in theory, Darren, Charmaine, Wayne, Liam and Chantelle from a 'low class' background' are more likely to come into contact with trouble/crime than Daniel, Matthew, Gemma (
Linear Mode
