Does the first letter of your name affect your life decisions?

Chatterjee, Mishra, and Mishra share that “Nominative determinism manifests as a preference for a profession or city to live in that begins with the same letter as a person’s own name. . . . To examine whether the effect occurs in the real world, we use large language models trained on Common Crawl, Twitter, Google News, and Google Books using two natural language processing word-embedding algorithms (word2vec and GloVe). After controlling for relevant variables, we find consistent evidence of the relationship between people’s names and a preference for major life choices starting with the same letter as their first name.”

Promothesh Chatterjee, Himanshu Mishra, and Arul Mishra.  2023. “Does the First Letter of One’s Name Affect Life Decisions?  A Natural Language Processing Examination of Nominative Determinism.”  Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, vol. 125, no. 5, pp. 943-968, https://doi.org/10.1037/pspa0000347