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Guest Essay

By Jesse Singal

Mr. Singal is the author of “The Quick Fix: Why Fad Psychology Can’t Cure Our Social Ills.”

Long before Reddit users discovered the firefighter Les McBurney, humans were fascinated by the idea that a person’s name influences his destiny.

The ancient Romans even left us a rhyme for this concept, nomen est omen, or “the name is an omen.” The proverb found real-world expression in 70 B.C., when Gaius Verres, a Roman official whose last name translates to “male swine,” was put on trial for myriad acts of plundering and extortion in Sicily. Unfortunately for Verres, the prosecutor in his trial was none other than the legendary orator Cicero, who argued that Verres’s conduct “confirmed his name” — an early example of what we might now call a sick burn.

In the millenniums since Cicero’s gibe, the relationship between names and destinies has increasingly become the subject of scientific inquiry — something not just to be wondered about or disseminated through epic stories but also to be quantified and tested empirically.

I’ve dug into the evidence for nominative determinism, or the theory that a person’s name influences his choice of occupation, interests or spouse, and I think there are good reasons to be skeptical of it. But the continued interest in the idea — across centuries and, arguably, against the evidence — is in itself revealing, highlighting humans’ deep-seated desire for order in a chaotic universe and the role science plays in satisfying that need.

Modern popular interest in nominative determinism can be traced to 1994, when the magazine New Scientist cited an article pointing out that scientists and writers often seemed pulled by their own names toward certain subjects. The best example cited in that column by far is an article about incontinence in the British Journal of Urology written by the team of A.J. Splatt and D. Weedon. It was a New Scientist........

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