Nominative Determinism

Nominative determinism is the hypothesis that people tend to gravitate toward areas of work or interest that happen to fit their own names. The term was coined in the magazine New Scientist in 1994, after the magazine's humorous Feedback column noted several real scientific studies carried out by researchers with remarkably fitting surnames, including a book on polar exploration written by a researcher named Daniel Snowman and an article on urology by researchers named Splatt and Weedon, examples that led to lighthearted speculation that some sort of psychological effect was at work. The idea that people are drawn to professions fitting their own names had earlier been suggested by the psychologist Carl Jung, who cited as an example Sigmund Freud, a researcher of pleasure whose own surname means joy in German; nominative determinism is distinguished from the related concept of the aptronym, which describes only that a name fits without addressing why, since nominative determinism specifically concerns the question of causality.