Studies showing that teachers will form expectations of a student's character and ability based on nothing more than his or her name are unfortunately nothing new. Students with "traditional," common names are more likely to receive higher ratings on both academic performance and behavior than those with names perceived as odd. What makes this article worth commenting on is not the results of the study, but the names themselves.
The study reveals that . . . traditional names such as Charlotte, Sophie, Marie, Hannah, Alexander, Maximilian, Simon, Lukas and Jakob are consistently linked to strong performance and good behaviour. Non-traditional names such as Chantal, Mandy, Angelina, Kevin, Justin and Maurice, on the other hand, are associated with weak performance and bad behaviour.
That's when I ceased skimming the article and paid attention. Traditional names? Maximilian? Sophie? Ah, the ".de" in the url explains everything. It's nice to see another perspective on the same problem.
But why do the Germans have such a prejudice against Kevins? All the Kevins I know are really nice people and far brighter than average.
The name Kevin was perceived as being linked to especially poor behaviour and performance, with one study participant even writing that, “Kevin is not a name—it’s a diagnosis!”
Bizarre.
Fortunately, the person I know who would be most likely to use this information against his brother is unlikely to read my blog.I was looking at the election results and I noted one race where two people with "regular" sounding names had won, and the the third candidate had a foreign sounding name, and only collected 16% of the vote, and I wondered how informed the votes were, or did they vote based on his last name. This particular race was not in our district, so I know nothing about it, other than our names, but there were some races in our district that I wonder how many people knew anything about the candidates, since the information was hard to come by.
