The Rise and Fall of Names
Information cascades commonly occur in many parts of society including restaurants, social media trends, and television. How about names? Nate Silver points out that it is often easy to estimate how old someone is based solely off her name. For instance, the name Brittany has fluctuated much in the last 50 years. In 1965, the name Brittany was not one of the 1000 most popular baby girl names. Fast forward to 1990, and Brittany is the 3rd most popular name among girls. When we jump another 25 years to today, we notice that Brittany has again declined to the 456th most popular girl name.
Why does this occur? There surely must be some information cascade happening that can explain this phenomenon of names. Perhaps there exists some information-based reason that may explain it, people naming their child a certain name know some intrinsic benefit associated with that name that you are unaware of. An article by Stephen Levitt and Stephen Dubner suggests that high-income families give names there initial popularity, wherein low-income families follow the trend. The rationale behind following a trend could be something like this: I see my friend, who is happier or wealthier, named their child Kyle; I think their may be some benefit of naming my child Kyle that I am not aware of. Additionally, a person may believe that naming their child using this reasoning will correlate with the child’s happiness and success. To reiterate, the central claim is that because some people think a name sounds good, other people might think there exists some unknown benefit to people who have that name.
We can also speculate that cascades are caused by direct benefits. The name Forrest, for example peaked in 1994. Interestingly, this is the same year that the movie Forrest Gump was released. It is reasonable to assume that upon seeing the movie, parents were more inclined to name their son Forrest. These parents might assume that due to Forrest Gump their Forrest will directly benefit when people connect his name to the movie. So, popular culture may impact our idea of direct benefits associated with names.
In addition, if I notice that a certain name is gaining popularity, it follows that this name will be mainstream for this generation. Furthermore, there may be a benefit to a person having a common name, such as social acceptance. This fact may cause parents to follow the mainstream, as they want their kid to benefit from having a common name relative to everybody around them.
http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/how-to-tell-someones-age-when-all-you-know-is-her-name/
http://www.slate.com/articles/business/the_dismal_science/2005/04/trading_up.2.html
https://www.socialsecurity.gov/cgi-bin/babyname.cgi
I have a middle schooler conducting a research project who would like to quote some of the work in these blogs. To whom can he attribute the authorship of these blog entries? Are they students or faculty?
Students
These posts are written by students. I would encourage your middle schooler to check out the original article links at the bottom of the posts and quote those instead.
Hello Jim,
The people writing these blogs are students enrolled in Networks. Some have chosen not to put their names out there publicly. Hope this helps!