Why Zack is a failure and Andy succeeds - November 15, 2007
A strange study out this week suggests that students whose names begin with the letter A are more likely to get A grades than those whose names start with D. We’re more likely to get Ds apparently. This is of course generating “what’s in a name?” news coverage from USA Today, UPI, Vancouver Sun, plus a good piece on Newsweek.
Leif Nelson at the University of California, San Diego and colleague Joseph Simmons from Yale University, reviewed grade point averages for MBA students at an unspecified private American university. They found students named Carl or Daniel, for instance, had lower averages than those such as Adrian or Boris, “presumably because of an unconscious fondness for these letters”, says the press release. Nelson and Simmons also looked at baseball players and found a higher strikeout rate from players whose names began with a ‘K’, the letter which is used to record a strikeout.
So far so hokey – finding random correlations in data is always possible. My office has a Geoff Brumfiel who recently moved to Great Britain. If I go on holiday to Washington DC next year maybe we’ll have a trend. But Nelson and Simmons also did a laboratory test...
They asked study participants to solve anagrams, some of which were not really anagrams as they had no solutions. Participants had to click a button to indicate they were done with the task, either an ‘I have solved all these’ button or an ‘I have not solved all these’ button. The former had an over $100 prize, the latter an under $100 prize. Obviously those clicking the first button were lying. But Nelson and Simmons also found that attaching a participant’s initial to the ‘I have failed’ button (eg – press button D if you have failed) made performance worse. “As predicted, when the prize for failure matched participants’ first initial, participants performed especially poorly on the anagram task,” they report.
There was no improved performance seen when A and B named individuals were compared to those without grade relevant names, which seems slightly suspicious. Also the study only seems to have looked at A to D grades. Whether or not this holds up if you look at examinations that grade right down to F remains to be seen. It’s also not clear what happens to the Andy Denvers and Bob Crows of this world.
I’m filing this one under Doesn’t Convince.
Image: Punchstock
Comments
What a joke?.
Posted by: Selvaraj | November 16, 2007 05:46 AM
Perhaps if these universities did not waste so much time and money on useless studies, tuition would be lower - and students might actually learn something useful!
WHAT A WASTE OF TIME AND MONEY!
Posted by: Adria Adams | December 1, 2007 08:48 PM
Good ones, may be the simple things to ponder when one is relaxed.
I suspect that similar situation may exist in cricket also.
I observed few years before that players whose name started with letter s had higher striking rates and also hit more sixes.
Also looks like it holds good,is the letter s is heard more when call them by their name. And irrespective of the country which they belong to.
To name a few,
Sanath jayaSoorya
Sachin. chriS gyale, pietorSon, Siddhu, a. SymondS,
chriS cairnS, viv richardS,
garfield Sobers, graeme Smith, j kalliS, herschelle gibbs, Shivnarine chanderpaul, kumar Sangakkara
Posted by: ananda | December 2, 2007 02:32 AM
So that is why I was a "B" student instead of an "A" student?
Posted by: Mr Bodner | December 2, 2007 02:45 AM
My name is John; by implication I should be spending my life cleaning toilets rather than working as a college professor.
Posted by: John A. Bayerl | December 2, 2007 03:42 PM
I really have very little respect for such kind of research. The same has been echoed earlier in Malcolm Gladwell's "Blink". If you note my name, A appears all over but most of the time, barring a few exceptions I have been in B+ category during my graduation and post graduation. The worst is when you publicize such research large scale and end up influencing human behaviour. Its important that the methodology for such research be made transparent for a critique.
Posted by: Amitangshu Acharya | December 3, 2007 03:03 AM
I began reading this anticipating confirmation of a different sort of name-related bias, which I had always suspected myself. As an unmarried student with a surname beginning with "B", I was always near the front of the room or line when teachers organized their classes alphabetically. Just as a baseball manager loads the front of his line-up with his best hitters, I always seemed to get more turns during whatever class activities were at hand (math problems at the board, reading aloud, etc.), not to mention that I wasn't hidden in the back of the room and trying to see & hear lessons from afar. I am now married with an "S" surname, and I wonder if this will negatively impact my daughter's school experience! Has anyone else every considered the same issue?
Posted by: Cynthia Schon | December 3, 2007 04:49 PM
Yes....Lupert STRYer and BiochemiSTRY too
Posted by: Soja Saghar Soman | December 12, 2007 12:09 PM