- Joined
- Aug 18, 2002
- Messages
- 19,406
Apparently not:
http://education.guardian.co.uk/egweekl ... 72,00.html
What's in a name
Early demise of the theory of deadly initials
Marc Abrahams
Tuesday March 28, 2006
The Guardian
The great initial discovery of 1999 - that a man's monogram could cause his early death was dismaying. But maybe it was all a mistake. A second, very careful look, carried out by two sceptical economists, says it just ain't so.
In 1999, a blockbuster report called What's in a Name: Mortality and the Power of Symbols gave people the willies. It said: "Individuals with 'positive' initials (for example, ACE, VIP) might live longer than those with "negative" initials (eg PIG, DIE)." Three psychologists at the University of California, San Diego, discovered this by poring through death records, and gathering and crunching numbers. They then published a warning in the Journal of Psychosomatic Research.
Nicholas Christenfeld, David Phillips and Laura Glynn were deadly serious about it. "Males with positive initials live 4.48 years longer" than most people, they explained, "whereas males with negative initials die 2.80 years younger".
They explained the mechanism:
"Parents might fail to notice that the initials they are about to give a child could have negative connotations. This oversight suggests that there may be many offspring who have been inadvertently assigned initials with negative connotations. These may cause individuals not to think well of themselves, and they may have to endure teasing and other negative reactions from those around them."
Gary Smith, an economics professor at Pomona College in Claremont, California, teamed up with his student Stilian Morrison to give this a good, hard look-see.
The Christenfeld study compared the ages of all the people who died in a particular year. But, say Smith and Morrison, if - instead - you look at the lifespans of all the people who were born in a particular year, the pattern doesn't show up. Also, they say, if you use a more complete list of "good" and "bad" words, the effect doesn't appear.
If Smith and Morrison are correct, the initials big bang theory may have died at the untimely age of six years.
http://education.guardian.co.uk/egweekl ... 72,00.html