I Sell Seashells by the Seashore and My Name is Jack: Comment on Pelham, Mirenberg, and Jones (2002)

According to a new hypothesis based on implicit egotism, people gravitate toward cities, states, and careers with names similar to their own names. To support this hypothesis, B. W. Pelham, M. C. Mirenberg, and J. T. Jones (2002) reported a series of results regarding distributions of names in different cities, states, and jobs. In the present article, new analyses of the original data are reported, showing that the hypothesis is not supported for the large majority of names considered by the authors, and for some names even the opposite result is found. In addition, a meta-analysis reveals that either the data are unreliable, or the hypothesis cannot be supported in the whole population of names. Overall, the original data give no support of the idea that implicit egotism influences major life decisions