The Power Of Names In Everyday
Interactions
‘‘I have a horrible, horrible name . . .
this name has been holding me back my entire life.
It’s probably why kids picked on me in school
and why I never do well with women.’’
Chandler Bing – Friends
(Bright, 2003)
Within the course of everyday interactions and micro-sociology
what possesses more power: the name (or label) attached to a thing, or the
substance of the thing itself? “Do names really lack the power to influence or
the force to injure? Would a rose really command as much deep respect and awe
if it were known as a petunia or a pansy?” (Ruane & Cerulo 2008, p. 95).
There is prevalent research which now opposes Shakespeare’s famous assertion
about substance over superficial names and indeed declares that names have the
power to manipulate our perceptions of people, places and even our own selves.
By definition, a name is “a word or set of words by which a person or thing is
known, addressed, or referred to”, yet realistically a name is so much more
than this. A name can signify power and prestige, different phases of life, or
even different identities. Names are now rife with connotations so when it
comes to everyday interactions like going to school or even logging onto a
dating website to find that special someone, a name can influence the way we
perceive others and imbue within us a variety of preconceptions and judgmental
thoughts before we even put a face to the name. It is argued that names
manipulate our everyday social interactions as they can add value to the
cultural scripts we follow on a day-to-day basis, as well as acting as a marker
for the performances we use to convey our different ‘selves’ to the rest of
society.
The data which will be analysed is an excerpt from the ABC satirical television
comedy series titled The
Chaser’s War on Everything (CWOE). Although
the show is semi-scripted, in many of the skits performed the presenters
approach strangers to begin interactions, the strangers’ interactions with the
presenters are natural just as the presenters instantaneously provide their own
natural reactions in response to the strangers’ responses.
The skit titled ‘Citizen’s
Infringement Officer – Baby Names’ (CWOE, 2006), is one of a series of
skits in which Julian Morrow approaches strangers in public, pretending to be
an Infringement Officer. In the data provided, Morrow approaches strangers on
the street and inquires about the names of their babies and young children,
with the intent of pronouncing them appropriate or inappropriate. When the
strangers respond with the required information, Morrow responds by fining the
stranger for giving their child an ‘inappropriate baby name’ (CWOE, 2006, 0:13).
The interactions are short and sharp as
Morrow claims that the strangers’ child’s name is inappropriate. In
each interaction with a new stranger Morrow responds to their response
instantly with what appears to be the first thing that pops into his head and
his reaction to their response is generally based upon a connotation attached
to the name.
POWER &
PRESTIGE:
It is not necessarily the
names which are important to analyze in the data, but the different social
classes of people, and how they react to the interaction. Another interesting aspect to analyze is the
data is the connotations which are easily attached to the names involved in the
interactions.
The strangers he talks to come from one end of the spectrum of society
to the other. There are two distinct social groups which Morrow approaches,
expensive looking wealthy people with strong accents and large vocabularies, and
stereotypical bogans who look cheap and speak with much profanity and
aggression. The most notable difference between the people he approaches is
their initial response to Morrow offensive reaction to their child’s name,
the higher end of the spectrum seem to take the insult in their stride without
even acknowledging that they (and their children) have been insulted (CWOE 2006,
0:46, 0:).The mother of Pegasus Ezekiel is clearly unperturbed when the presenter
responds to her child’s name by exclaiming “Are you serious?” in a tone of
disbelief (CWOE 2006, 1:22 - 1:31).
On the other hand the lower end of the social spectrum take great
offense to Morrow’s reaction to their child’s name. The two women referred to
are seen at the end of the data, and they respond to Morrow by verbally abusing
him when exclaiming “get fucked!” (CWOE 2006, 1:45). In addition to using
profanities, they also mock Morrow, rip up the fine Morrow hands to them and then
proceed to make rude sexual gestures behind his implying that he is a wanker (CWOE
2006, 1:32 – 1:55).
As Morrow has proved through his interactions contained in the data,
names definitely do have different connotations attached to them, which
subconsciously encourage people to make judgments about others based purely on
their name. Most of the boys’ names mentioned had very specific connotations
attached to them as they were not instantly considered strong masculine names.
‘Lucien’ and ‘Julian’ they were easily denounced as poncy, pretentious, weak
and girlish. Another connotation associated with the names mentioned, specifically
‘Hunter’ and ‘Tiarna’ was the ridiculousness of the name. ‘Hunter’ was
instantly criticized as a “last name as a first name” (CWOE 2006, 0:23), while
‘Tiarna’ was dubbed an “ill thought out name... that she’d have to live with
for the rest of her life” (CWOE 2006, 0:28 – 0:34). Another interesting
judgement made by Morrow was that ‘Maddison with two ds’ was a bogan name (CWOE
2006, 0:58-1:05). In addition to this Morrow determined that ‘Samuel’ was
inappropriate simply because it reminded him of someone he hated, that had the
same name (CWOE 2006, 0:52). Thus not only do names come with connotations, the
pre-determined judgments that we associate with them can be focused on gender,
social status, deviance from the social norm or even simply a predetermined
dislike because of prior relationships with people by the same name.
From
Connotations to Cultural Scripts:
“The key idea of the theory of cultural scripts is that widely shared
and widely known ways of thinking can be identified in terms of the same
empirically established universal human concepts, with their universal grammar”
(Wierzbicka 2002, p.1168). Wierzbicka (2002) argues that the skillful
use of culturally acceptable profanities is a key aspect of the Australian
cultural script. By understanding and successfully negotiating the cultural
scripts which are unique to Australia we are able to communicate and socialize
with one another. While discussing cultural scripts Wierzbicka states
that Relate to each other through the notion of ‘‘someone like me”, a cultural
script with “the semantic component” of drawing parallels between ourselves and
others through the way of “alter[ing] surnames like Thommo for Thomson or Gibbo
for Gibson, first name forms like Shaz for Sharon, Gaz for Gavin, or Lozza for
Laurie, and so on” (2002, p. 1194). Just as Australians expect other
Australians to use Aussie slang and swear words when interacting, they also
expect other Australians to have typical Aussie names which are generally
Anglo-Saxon, easy to pronounce and can be converted into some variation of an
iconic Aussie nickname like Shazza or Bazza.
NAMES & EVERDAY INTERACTIONS:
Gebauer (2012) and Anderson-Clark
(2008) both
assert than names can indeed influence our thoughts and perceptions of other
people. Gebauer focuses on how names
can influence a person’s prospects of finding true love, and Anderson-Clark investigates how names
can impact upon a person’s education. These two important examples of everyday
interaction (getting an education and searching for a soul mate) are both
examples in which people subconsciously judge others and make assumptions based
on nothing more than a name.
Love Life:
Gebauer
(2012)
conducted a recent study
which found that people were neglected because they possessed devalued, or
negative, names. The study was conducted using emails and an online-dating
website, where emails were sent to online-daters containing the name, age and
general location of fictional people who could be possible love interests. The
emails which were sent deliberately omitted information about hobbies,
religious beliefs and physical descriptions such as photos. The emails
contained a link which would take the online-dater to the fictional person’s
profile, with researchers tracking and comparing who had the highest and lowest
number of profile views based on how many online-daters clicked on a specific
link.
The aim of the
study was to compare unattractive names against attractive names in order to
understand if website users were neglected or devalued purely because of their
names, and no other biases (eg physical appearance, age, location). Gebauer found that people with
unattractive received significantly lower profile views than those who had
attractive names, thus proving that “negative names evoke negative
interpersonal reactions, which in turn influence people’s life outcomes for the
worse” (2012, p. 2).
The age old adage penned by Shakespeare, that
substance prevails over a name, is thus replaced with a new truth, that “names
determine life outcomes” (Neberich 2011, p.1).
Gebauer (2012, p. 2 ) suggests
that “it may appear hard to believe that something as mundane as a negative
first name can evoke neglect, discrimination, prejudice, or even ostracism.
Yet, when getting to know a person, the person’s name is among the first
information received, and the halo effect may lead people to generalize
name-valence to broader inferences about the individual”. While Gebauer’s work is relatively new, the ideas surrounding
name-based discrimination are not so recent.
Education:
Anderson-Clark (2008) completed a study with a similar basis as Gebauer’s work mentioned above. Anderson-Clark provided a sample group
of primary school teachers with various vignettes of fictional students and
asked to judge their likely behaviours and characteristics. The result of Anderson-Clark’s study was that teachers
awarded significantly lower achievement scores to students with ethnic sounding
names, while students with Caucasian names received higher scores. Teachers
were more likely to make discriminate against students and make name-based
biased assumptions. Names can most
certainly be powerful elements in everyday interactions as “they represent a
mark of identity indicative of culture, heritage, religion, and parents’ hopes
and dreams”(Anderson-Clark 2008, p. 94).
Jumping back
almost 4 decades, Busse & Seraydarian
(1978) found the same instances of name-based discrimination, however in
that instance the discrimination was instigate by other students in the
classroom. Student’s picked their friends and determined the hierarchy of who
was popular and unpopular based upon the names of their peers.
EXTENDED ANALYSIS OF DATA
From
Connotations to Confrontations:
The original piece of data, taken on its own and
viewed from an analytical stand point, can easily be considered a breaching
experiment. It goes against many social norms to merely walk up to a stranger
and be truthful and honest, as well as blunt and insulting. Garfinkle was the pioneer of using
breaching experiments to understand why we act the way we do, and why we don’t
easily do things that go against the social norm. “Garfinkle is concerned with
the social construction of routine, mundane reality at the micro-level” (Flam
2005, p.58). Morrow deliberately sets out
to manipulate the sequence of actions in an attempt to deviant from the normal
flow of interaction. Thus the interactees are forced to engage in a procedure which
attempts to normalize the discrepancies which arise between what they expect to
occur and what happens in reality. Morrow creates his breaches of social
interaction by following Garfinkle’s notion of “starting with an established
context of interaction and seeing what be done to disrupt it” (Giddens &Turner
1987, p.233).
Provoking
Performances:
One analysis of Data
Set 1 neatly links in with Goffman’s
theory which distinguishes between ‘front stage’ and ‘back stage’ performances.
Goffman defines a front stage
performance as a manipulated social interaction where people deliberately try
to express a positive impression of one’s self upon others. In contrast to this
people can also participate in back stage performances, which are considered
private and personal and uninfluenced by other people. Throughout the data Morrow
attempts to provoke certain performances from the strangers he is interacting
with. Initially they interactees are respectful and polite, as they believe
they are entering into an interaction with a person in a position of authority.
This is initial interaction is clearly a front stage performance, which is
deliberately displayed to suit the nature of the interaction. However when the
instigator of the interaction insults the interactee, the tone of the
performance quickly diverges from polite and considerate to rude and
aggressive, and thus the backstage performance reveals itself.
Social research has
demonstrated that names definitely do impact upon our everyday mundane
interactions, in particular our access to education and our prospects of having
a successful love life. People are prone to name-based discrimination and
interact with other people based upon the connotations and preconceptions which
can be attached to a person’s name. The data presented has been analysed from a
variety of micro-sociological perspectives such as how names can form part of
the Australian cultural script, as well as the nature of the data being an
obvious display of Goffman’s back stage and front stages performances, as well
as a breach of social interactions. The final conclusion must be that names are
indeed powerful and influence the way we are treated and the way we treat
others during our everyday social interactions.
....
By Maiquilla Brown
Student: 3614864
Wednesday Tutorial @ 15:30 with Andrew
...
Bibliography
Anderson-Clark, T. Green, R. and Henley, T. 2008, “The
Relationship Between First Names and Teacher Expectations for Achievement
Motivation” , Journal of Language and Social Psychology 2008 vol. 27,
no. 94.
Bright, K.S.2003, Friends, television
program, National Broadcasting Company, New York.
‘Citizen’s
Infringement Officer – Baby Names’, excerpt from Season 1, Episode 26 of The
Chaser’s War on Everything 2006, television program, Australian Broadcasting
Corporation, Sydney, 8th September, accessed via http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B_tRKh3HXwg
Finch, J “Naming Names: Kinship, Individuality and
Personal Names” Sociology 2008 42: 709
Flam,
H. 2005, Emotions and Social Movements, Routledge New York.
Gebauer, J, Leary, M and Neberich, W, “Unfortunate
First Names : Effects of Name-Based Relational Devaluation and Interpersonal
Neglect” Social Psychological and
Personality Science 2012 3: 590 originally published online 22 December
2011
Giddens, A. and Turner,
J. 1987, Social Theory Today, Stanford University Press, California.
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E. 1967, “The Nature of Deference and Demeanor” in Interaction Ritual:
Essays on Face-to-Face Behaviour, Pantheon Books, New York.
Goffman,
E. 1971, “Performances” in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life,
Penguin, Harmondsworth.
Ruane, J.M. and Cerulo, K.A. 2008, Second thoughts:
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Thousand Oaks, Calif.
Thomas V. Busse T.V. and Seraydarian, L. 1978
‘The Relationships Between First Name Desirability And School Readiness, IQ,
And School Achievement’ Psychology in
the Schools, vol. 16, no. 2.
Wierzbicka, A. 2002, ‘Australian cultural scripts – bloody
revisited’, Journal of Pragmatics, vol. 34: pp. 1167-1209.
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