In the year after Hurricane Katrina made a toilet bowl out of New Orleans, baby names starting with "K" went up by nine percent. Why would new parents want to commemorate the costliest natural disaster in American history? It wasn't their fault, researchers say: The sounds we hear most often stick with us, and we end up bestowing them on our children.
Jonah Berger, a professor of marketing at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School, led a study of baby name popularity that will be published in the journal Psychological Science. The researchers looked at the frequency of all first names between 1882 and 2006, a dataset that included more than seven thousand names and 280 million babies.
Each of those seven thousand names was broken into sound chunks called phonemes. For example, "Karen" became five phonemes: K, eh, r, ah, and n. The researchers then asked whether a name's ...
