Hiya. Today I want to 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 realized

that a surprising number of academic papers seem to be written by people whose names matched

their subject. One example that gets mentioned

quite often is a paper about urinary incontinence that was written by two researchers called

Splat 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 gets 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 Bortflower.

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 going to 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

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