READERS new to Feedback may be unaware of our attempts over the years to expand humanity’s understanding of nominative determinism – the phenomenon, first identified in this column, in which people’s ...

Names have power. It's a pretty common trope in fantasy books. Even here in the real world, some people believe that the influence of names on the careers people choose can be very real. That's the ...

Feedback has found a contender for the 2025 Reverse Nominative Determinism gong: the scientific journal Intelligence Hang on, readers may be thinking. How did we get from a scientific journal ...

When your last name is Carpenter and you grow up to work as a carpenter, you may think of it as a funny coincidence, but research finds that your name could have been nudging your subconscious all ...

A rose by any other name would smell as sweet, but would Usain Bolt, by any other name, be as fast? How much do our names determine what we do in life? We’ve taken a look at why a disproportionate ...

Nominative determinism, i.e. the theory that people gravitate towards jobs or activities that reflect their name, is a thing. Researchers once found that people called Dennis or Denise were more ...

Patients named Brady could be at an increased risk of requiring a pacemaker compared with the general population, say researchers in a paper published in the Christmas edition of The BMJ this week.