This could be a name changer
Two Castlepollard schoolboys have set out to find just how much people judge you based on your first name.
Adam Maxwell and Bartle D’Arcy’s team project ‘The Name Game’ has been accepted as an entry in BT Young Scientist and Technology Exhibition, which takes place at the RDS in January.
The two second years had an exam week last week but are back in earnest to find out just what we think about first names and if there might be reasons our first names might work against us long before people meet us.
“What if, without us even realising it, without any reasons, there are things we judge people on based on what their name looks like or sounds like,” said Bartle.
“And what does that mean for us in school or work – or even online, where we might be interacting socially in a place where only our name is the information,” Adam added.
The boys are keen footballers with their local club Ballycomoyle and spend their weekend cycling. Bartle hopes to join the gardaí and Adam is a keen coder and sees his future in the world of business and entrepreneurial activity.
“People have studied if a name that is hard to pronounce leads to bias in the workplace when it comes to promotion – and there is even a study of when people who have names similar to the names given to storms and hurricanes, they give more money to the fundraising efforts to support the communities devastated by the storm’s destruction,” said Bartle.
“Imagine the application for that – by giving Storms popular names or popular sounds inside names – you increase fundraising for repairs without any expensive campaign changes.
“The thing about bias is that if we tell people about the bias, then they might correct it,” Adam said, “that the questions to try and find the answers, may, just by being asked, make the person answering them change to try to correct the bias. I mean, no one at all ever wants to be thought of as biased or judging people. So we have to be super careful.”
The boys are also going to practise their people skills, a great deal.
“We are both quite quiet and shy,” said Bartle, “we are not really into talking to loads of people and our project means we are going to have to learn how to do that. We will have to get out and chat to people, persuade them to take our questionnaires and hopefully learn how to just engage people.”
Adam agrees but he intends to start close to home.
“As soon as our exams finish, I am going to start my questionnaires with my friends, family and neighbours – get a bit of practice. Our teachers will also let us practise on them in the school, so we will learn about the best way to carry out these one-to-one surveys. We have to learn to be polite but also keep people answering just the questions so that we can collect the data.”
The two boys are not interested in influencing the naming of babies in 2023 but they do think there will be important findings for people in their study.
“People put a lot of thought into naming their children,” said Bartle, “like my mam was going to call me Adam, it was the name she had chosen so it is my middle name.”
Both boys started to laugh and Adam admitted, “I did not know that”.
“But what if there are things that need to be considered that people do not even think about? Maybe we will find something that is hidden away in our heads that we should be aware of.”
The two boys also discussed life online.
“There are really important rules to follow to keep us safe online. When we choose names online, we make sure that there is nothing in what we use that can identify us,” said Adam.
“More and more people will be interacting with just names and no other information. So knowing what does and does not work when people are judging a name in a split second and may never meet you or know you – that is bound to be important.”
How to get involved
If you would like to participate in Bartle and Adam’s BTYSE project, they have a Facebook page called ‘The Name Game’ (https://www.facebook.com/ainm4) and would appreciate likes and follows.
In the coming weeks, they will be posting quizzes, questionnaires and other fun surveys and they would appreciate people helping to fill them out.
Just now the boys have a questionnaire about naming babies.
The team will also be interviewing people about how they work to overcome implicit bias and that will form a part of their finished project.