What leads cultural tastes and practices to be abandoned? (.pdf) A new PNAS paper by marketing professor Jonah Berger and organizational psychologist Gael Le Mens argues that the faster a trend rises, the faster it's likely to fall, at least as regards longitudinal data of first names given to American children. (Via the Baby Names Blog.) Berger has written before on the drive to non-conform; a 2007 joint paper with Emily Pronin and Sarah Molouki (.pdf) shows that "people see others as more conforming than themselves.... placing more weight on introspective evidence of conformity (relative to behavioral evidence) when judging their own susceptibility to social influence as opposed to someone else's."
posted by escabeche on May 5, 2009 - 42 comments

White Power if it's a boy, Aryan Justice if it's a girl.
posted by Robot Johnny on Mar 29, 2005 - 146 comments

Names in Time [babyfilter]
Martin Wattenberg has crafted an elegant interactive visualization of this baby-name data (discussed mefiwise here ). Martin's work discussed here before: 1 2 3
posted by e.e. coli on Feb 8, 2005 - 70 comments

Parent's name their baby "Espn" after the all sports network ESPN. One of my pet peeves is when parents name their babies something "unique" or "cute." I read somewhere that the director Robert Rodruiguez named his kid Rocket. Don't these parents understand how much teasing their children are going to have to endure? Aargh.
posted by JFunk2800 on Apr 5, 2001 - 32 comments