59 Seconds: Think a Little, Change a Lot (28 page)

The choice of a first name can matter too. Even after drawing up a short list of possible names for their offspring, and asking friends and family for advice, some people still struggle. Is it better to go with a traditional name or a modern one? Is naming a child after a celebrity a good idea? Is it more important to have a name that rolls off the tongue or one that stands out from the crowd? Psychology can lend a helping hand.

Previous work has shown that people with names that have positive associations do especially well in life. For example, teachers tend to award higher essay grades to children who they believe have more likeable names (Rose, for instance),
¹⁰
college students whose names have undesirable associations experience high levels of social isolation, and those whose surnames happen to have negative connotations (such as Short, Little, or Bent) are especially likely to suffer feelings of inferiority.
¹¹

I teamed up with the Edinburgh International Science Festival to help discover which first names were seen as especially successful and attractive in the twenty-first century. This study involved more than six thousand people going online and
indicating whether they thought some of the most popular first names in the United Kingdom seemed successful and attractive. Strong trends emerged. Traditional names with royal associations (such as James and Elizabeth) were viewed as highly successful and intelligent. In contrast, the most attractive female names tended to be soft-sounding ones that end with the
ee
sound (such as Lucy and Sophie), whereas the sexiest male names were short and often rugged-sounding (such as Jack and Ryan). At the other end of the spectrum, Lisa and Brian were seen as the least successful, and Ann and George as the most unattractive.

There is also the issue of initials. As noted in
Quirkology
, research by Nicholas Christenfeld and his coworkers at the University of California suggests that a person’s initials may become an issue of life or death.
¹²
After analyzing a huge computerized database containing millions of Californian death certificates, they discovered that men with positive initials (such as A.C.E., H.U.G., and J.O.Y.) lived about four and a half years longer than average, whereas those with negative initials (such as P.I.G., B.U.M., and D.I.E.) died about three years early. Women with positive initials lived an extra three years, although there was no detrimental effect for those with negative initials.

New research, conducted in 2007 by Leif Nelson and Joseph Simmons, indicates that these effects are not just limited to the relatively small number of people whose initials happen to make especially positive or negative words.
¹³
Instead, according to their work, even the hint of initial-based positivity or negativity is enough to exert a major influence on people’s lives.

In certain situations, single letters are associated with success or failure. Perhaps the best-known, and in many ways most important, example of this occurs during the grading of
exams. In most forms of testing, those who have done well are awarded As and Bs, whereas those toward the bottom of the class tend to receive Cs and Ds. Nelson and Simmons wondered whether people whose first or last initials matched one of the two top grades might be unconsciously motivated to perform well on exams, whereas those whose names start with either
C
or
D
might not try to achieve such high marks. To find out if this bold hypothesis was true, the duo analyzed fifteen years of students’ grade point averages from a large American university. Remarkable as it may seem, the results revealed that students with first or last names starting with an
A
or a
B
had obtained significantly higher grade point averages than those beginning with the letters
C
or
D
.

Excited by their initial success, Nelson and Simmons turned their attention to the impact that this effect might have on people’s lives. They thought that if students whose names began with
A
or
B
obtained higher exam marks than those whose names began with
C
or
D
, the former group might find it easier to get into better graduate schools and so have more successful careers. To test their hypothesis, they needed to find a large, searchable database containing students’ initials and the graduate school that they had attended. After much searching, they eventually found the perfect resource—the online database of the American Bar Association. The research team created a computer program capable of scanning the online information for the number of people with the key initials in each of the 170 law schools listed. After designating the quality of the schools by using information from
U.S. News & World Report
rankings and comparing this with the data from almost four hundred thousand lawyers, Nelson and Simmons had their answer. As the quality of law schools declined, so too did the proportion of graduates from those law schools who had the initials
A
or
B
. As they note at the
end of their report, “It seems that people with names like Adlai and Bill tend to go to better law schools than do those with names like Chester and Dwight.”

IN 59 SECONDS

Research shows that people with surnames that begin with a letter toward the beginning of the alphabet are more successful in life than those whose names begin with letters toward the end. Obviously, the potential for choosing a successful surname is limited, unless you are prepared to change your name or, if you are female, to marry a man whose surname falls toward the start of the alphabet. However, with respect to choosing a child’s first name, other research can provide a helping hand. Names with positive connotations, royal associations, or those that sound especially attractive are all good bets. Finally, do not underestimate the power of initials. Avoid creating a set of initials that make a word with negative associations, and help to ensure exam success by going for names starting with the letter
A
or
B
.

PRAISE BE!

Almost every manual on good parenting promotes the power of praise, with some self-help gurus suggesting that the single best thing you can do for your children is to build up their self-esteem by constantly giving compliments. Tell your children how intelligent they are when they pass an exam. Congratulate them on their artistic streak when they produce a nice drawing. Celebrate their athletic abilities when they score a goal or win a race. According to this approach, negativity
should be banished and the focus instead firmly placed on even the smallest of successes.

The idea has enormous intuitive appeal. Always tell the little ones that they are wonderful, and surely they will grow up to be confident and happy people. So far, so good. There is, however, just one small problem with this rather utopian view of the human psyche. Research suggests that telling children that they are bright and talented is a terrible thing to do.

In the late 1990s Claudia Mueller and Carol Dweck at Columbia University conducted a large-scale program of research on the psychology of praise.
¹⁴
Their experiments involved more than four hundred children between 10 and 12 years of age, who were drawn from a variety of ethnic and socioeconomic backgrounds. In a typical study, the children were presented with an intelligence test in which they were asked to look at rows of shapes and, using logic alone, work out which shape should come next in each series. After they had worked through the problems, the experimenters took away their workbooks and calculated the scores but provided each child with false feedback. They explained that each child had done really well, solving 80 percent of the problems correctly.

In addition to this feedback, one group of the children was told that they must be really bright to have solved so many puzzles, while another group was greeted with stony silence. According to the self-help gurus who promote the positive power of praise, just spending a few seconds complimenting a child’s ability can have a dramatic effect. The results revealed that they are right, but perhaps not quite in the way they had anticipated.

In the next stage of the experiment, the researchers told the children that they could choose to try one of two tasks. One of the tasks would be quite difficult and so they might not succeed,
but they would be challenged and learn even if they failed. In contrast, the other task was much easier, and so they were likely to do well but learn little. About 65 percent of the children who had been told they were intelligent opted for the easy task, compared to just 45 percent of those who had not been praised. The children who had been told they were intelligent were far more likely to avoid challenging situations, and instead stick to the easy stuff. This is not exactly good news for the “praise be” approach to parenting. However, worse was yet to come.

In the next phase of the experiment, the researchers gave the children some more puzzles. This time the puzzles were much harder than the first set, and so most of the children did not perform especially well. Afterward, all of the children were asked how much they had enjoyed the puzzles and whether they would continue working on them at home. Dramatic differences between the groups emerged. The children who had received just a single sentence praising their intelligence found the difficult puzzles far less enjoyable than their classmates did, and so they were far less likely to work on them on their own time.

Even more bad news for the advocates of praise emerged in the third and final part of the study. After the children had struggled on the difficult puzzles, the experimenters asked them to try one final test. This last set of puzzles was just as easy as the one that the children had encountered at the start of the study. Even though the two groups of children had obtained roughly the same scores at the beginning of the experiment, their performances on the final test were very different. The pattern of results was exactly the opposite of that predicted by many self-help gurus. The children who had been told they were intelligent obtained far lower scores than the others.

Why should praise have counterintuitive and counterproductive effects? According to Mueller and Dweck, several factors are at work. Telling a child that they are intelligent might make them feel good, but it can also induce a fear of failure, causing the child to avoid challenging situations because they might look bad if they are not successful. In addition, telling a child that they are intelligent suggests that they do not need to work hard to perform well. Because of this, children may be less motivated to make the required effort, and so be more likely to fail. Unfortunately, if they subsequently obtain a low mark, it is also more likely that their motivation will collapse and a sense of helplessness will set in. After all, low marks suggest that they are not as bright as they were told and that there is nothing they can do about it. The psychological impact of poor results should not be underestimated. At one point in the Mueller and Dweck studies, all of the children were asked to tell their classmates how well they had performed on the test involving the difficult puzzles. Almost 40 percent of the children who had been praised lied about their grade, compared to about 10 percent of those who had not been praised.

Does this mean that all praise is bad praise? So far, I have described only the results from two of the three groups of children involved in the Mueller and Dweck experiment. After getting their initial “Well done, you made 80 percent” feedback, a third group also received a single sentence of praise. However, this time the experimenters praised effort, not ability, noting that they must have tried really hard to have achieved such a high mark. These children behaved very differently from those in the two other groups. When it came to choosing between a challenging task and an easy one, only about 10 percent of them selected the easy option. Compared to the children who had been told that they were intelligent
or who received no praise at all, those in the “You must have tried very hard” group found the hard problems more enjoyable and were more likely to try to solve them on their own time. Finally, when given another set of easy problems at the end of the experiment, those in this third group solved significantly more than they did the first time around.

The results clearly showed that being praised for effort was very different from being praised for ability. According to Mueller and Dweck, the children praised for effort were encouraged to try regardless of the consequences, therefore sidestepping any fear of failure. As a result, the possibility for learning outweighed the fear of obtaining a low mark, and they preferred taking the challenging task to the easy option. Also, by definition, these children were more motivated to try hard on future tests, and so were more likely to succeed. And even if they did fail in the future, they could easily attribute their low marks to not trying hard enough, which avoided the sense of helplessness that could set in when poor results were seen as an indication of an innate inability to think.

Although the Mueller and Dweck studies were conducted in middle schools, other research has obtained the same type of findings among younger children and high school students.
¹⁵
The consensus is that all praise is not created equal. Some praise can have devastating effects on a child’s motivation, and other praise can help the child achieve the very best. Telling children that they possess a certain trait, such as being bright or talented, is not good for their psychological health because it encourages them to avoid challenging situations, not to try so hard, and quickly to become demotivated when the going gets tough. In contrast, praising effort encourages people to stretch themselves, work hard, and persist in the face of difficulties.