The Drip Feed Effect

This week’s episode looks at the tiny influences that shape the way we see ourselves and the world around us. Most people assume big life changes come from big events. Trauma, major decisions, life turning points. But in the therapy room what I often see is something much quieter than that. A slow drip of messages and expectations that build up over time.

Transcript

The Drip Feed Effect 0:00

Hiya. Today I wanna talk about one of my favourite little quirks of psychology. It's called nominative determinism, which is the idea that your name might influence the sort of job you end up doing later in life. Sounds a bit silly at first, like something you'd read in a pub quiz. But it's actually based on a pattern that scientists started noticing years ago. The phrase nominative determinism was coined by editors at New Scientist Magazine who realised that a surprising number of academic papers seemed to be written by people whose names matched they're subject. One example that gets mentioned quite often is a paper about urinary incontinence that was written by two researchers called Splatt and Weedon, which when you notice it is a little bit difficult to ignore. And then once you start looking for examples like that, you suddenly see them everywhere. Books about the Arctic, written by someone called Snowman, that sort of thing. There's a charity, a UK charity, that was set up to help ex armed forces folk get into other work outside of the armed forces, and it's called The Poppy Factory. The director of operations of the Poppy Factory is Debbie Boughtflower. If you hop onto the GMC, General Medical Council, website to look up the details of your gp, there are far more doctors on there with the surname Doctor than you'd expect to see. Now, of course some of that is gonna be a coincidence. There are millions of folk in the world and a lot of names to go around, but when psychologists started digging into it properly, they found something quite interesting. Studies have even shown that people called Dennis or Denise are statistically a little bit more likely to become dentists than people with other names. And people called Lawrence are slightly more likely to go into law because of L A W at the beginning of the name. Now, it's not massively more likely. It's not as if every Dennis you meet is secretly wishing it could drill teeth somewhere, but the effect genuinely does exist. And the reason might simply be familiarity. You gotta remember that your name is one of the very first things that you ever hear about yourself. From the day you're born. People are repeating it constantly over and over again for years. Dennis, come here. Denise, your dinner's ready, Lawrence, leave that alone. It'll drop off. Stuff like that. So when we hear words that sound similar, later in life, the brain already feels comfortable with them. Familiarity tends to make things feel more appealing, doesn't it? A bit more like us. And you can link this to something that's called the mere exposure effect, which is the idea that the more we encounter something, the more we tend to like it. It's why songs grow on you after hearing them for a few times. It might also explain why certain careers feel slightly more appealing when they sound a little bit like our name. And there's also something called the endowment effect. That's where we tend to value things more simply because they belong to us. If you give someone a mug or you give them a key ring or something and you ask them how much they would be willing to sell it for, they usually want more money than someone who doesn't own it would be willing to pay. Because once something is ours it feels like part of us. And our name is probably the most personal possession we have. Interestingly, some of the studies have suggested that the effect is slightly weaker with surnames for women than it is for men. Possibly'cause in many, many cultures, women traditionally change their surname when they marry, so there's less lifelong attachment to that particular name. Which is quite interesting. Now, I'm not suggesting that your name is gonna determine your destiny. If your surname happens to be Baker it doesn't mean that you are destined to spend your life making sourdough. But you can't ignore the highly likely situation of a kid with the surname Baker being interested in baking. Of course it's going to. But what it does show is something really fascinating about human psychology, that we all need to be aware of. We are influenced by tiny things. Small patterns, small repetitions, small bits of familiarity. Things that seem too trivial to matter but actually do. And when you realise that, it starts to make you wonder just how many other subtle influences are shaping the choices that we make without us ever really noticing. And maybe we should. Anyway, just a little thought for your Friday. Have a lovely weekend and I'll speak to you again soon. See ya.