Does the first letter of one's name affect life decisions? A natural language processing examination of nominative determinism.

Abstract

This research examines whether the phenomenon of nominative determinism (a name-driven outcome) exists in the real world. Nominative determinism manifests as a preference for a profession or city to live in that begins with the same letter as a person's own name. The literature presents opposing views on this phenomenon, with one stream of research documenting the influence and another stream questioning the existence and generalizability of the effect, as well as the proposed underlying process. To examine whether the effect occurs in the real world, we use large language models trained on Common Crawl, Twitter, Google News, and Google Books using two natural language processing word-embedding algorithms (word2vec and GloVe). After controlling for relevant variables, we find consistent evidence of the relationship between people's names and a preference for major life choices starting with the same letter as their first name. Our theoretical framework of identity expression builds on the implicit egotism explanation. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).