How Do Boom-And-Bust Business Cycles Influence Baby Names?

Tuesday, October 20, 2009, 12:18

The selection of baby name is very difficult after the birth of your little darling. So many factors test your selection while choosing a unique name for your baby. However parents often give their children names that have risen in popularity.

Parents often behave like “momentum" stock traders while choosing baby names. They abandon names that have come down on the popularity charts for their babies. The idea that individual naming choices are in a large part determined by the social environment that expecting parents' experience.

Like the stock market, cycles of boom and bust appear arise out of the interactions of a large set of agents who are continually influencing one another. This trend is moderately new and has taken shape from biases in how the public rates the overall appeal for cultural signs like names. Parents are increasingly sensitive to the change in frequency of a name in recent time. Names that are gaining in popularity are seen as more desirable than those that have fallen in popularity in the recent past.

This bias then becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy: names that are falling continue to fall while names on the rise reach new heights of popularity, in turn influencing a new generation of parents.

The study conducted by Todd Gureckis, an assistant professor of psychology at NYU, and Robert Goldstone, a professor of psychological and brain sciences at Indiana University. The study has been published in the journal Topics in Cognitive Science (Wiley-Blackwell). The psychologists came out with their conclusions after reviewing historical records on the frequency of names given to children in the US over the last 127 years.

The U.S. Social Security Administration provided the data.