Didn't get that promotion? Maybe your name's to blame.

Photo: flickr/quinetIf your last name is King or Prince, listen up -- you might be destined for greatness. In this "field study", German researchers determined whether people with different last names tend to end up in different jobs. They found that people with noble-sounding names, like "Kaiser", were more likely to hold managerial positions than people with more blue-collar-job-sounding names, like Koch ("cook"). Whether this is cause (people get promotions because of their names) or effect (people with noble-sounding names are more likely to go for promotions) remains to be determined. The authors also have a caveat to those in the USA: "Future studies should assess whether noble-sounding surnames are less likely to affect career outcomes in cultures in which coworkers commonly refer to each other by their first name (e.g., the United States), and the person’s surname is therefore less salient. Noble-sounding surnames may be more predictive of attaining ...