Your Name, Your Game?

When you teach at law school, as I have, you become familiar with a variety of reasons as to why students choose to study law—perhaps there’s a history of lawyers in the family; or their parents want them to do something, anything professional; or they want to right wrongs, get that BMW, enter politics, point damning fingers at witnesses… Even with those students who wound up in law school with apparently only a shrug for a reason, some explanation eventually surfaced.

Now there is a novel explanation—at least for a small portion of the student body. Two recent studies have explored the possibility that a student’s name might make the difference. Ernest Abel (“Influence of Names on Career Choices in Medicine,” Names Vol. 58 No. 2, June, 2010, 65–74—abstract only free online) has found that thanks to “implicit egotism” we may be motivated unconsciously to prefer career choices that remind us of our names. Thus, if your name is Doctor or includes “doc” or “med”, you’re more likely to become a doctor than a lawyer; and if your name is Law or starts with that syllable or “leg” or “att”, for example, the reverse is the case: you may feel drawn to law school.

Another study done a few years earlier (“Why Susie Sells Seashells by the Seashore: Implicit Egotism and Major Life Decisions,” Pelham et al., Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2002, Vol. 82, No. 4, 469–487) came to similar conclusions. 

One is… sceptical. I have to say that there’s no possibility that my name influenced me to pick law; I learned in high school biology class that it sounded unhappily close to “silaged fodder,” and yet I did not feel a pull towards farming. But things might be different for you. Or you. So I thought I’d experiment just a little. Now, I’ve no ability to run a proper study here, lacking nearly all statistical knowledge as well as the time it would take to do a proper job. But I decided that a down-and-dirty comparison might be fun, so I consulted the directory of the Law Society of Upper Canada and, for comparison, the Directory of Public Accounting Licensees, looking to see whether or not “law” names formed roughly similar proportions of each group. (Because the Law Society database required me to enter a city, I chose the largest, Toronto.)

As you see from the table below, the results are at odds with the outcomes of the Abel and Pelham studies. Indeed, having “law” within your name seems to incline you to accounting. Of course, it could be that we here in Canada or, indeed, here in Toronto, are somehow perverse — or just different from our American sibs, lacking, perhaps, that “implicit egotism” that would have, well, made me into a farmer.