Whatever will the boffins come up with next?

Professor Richard Wiseman is a professor of psychology at Hertfordshire University.

And he has just presented his research into how your first name will affect how people view you.

His results can be found here.

Anyway just for fun I looked up to see how our Prime minister, Helen Clark,  and her major rival, John Key fare in the christian name stakes.

                                                       

	Success	Luck	Attractiveness
Helen	7.6	1.57	2.0
John	4.8	2.31	2.2

So Helen is perceived to be more successful than John but not as lucky and marginally less attractive.

How the good professors research will factor into the general election results later this year is at this point unknown.

Whether John Key's margin in the Luck factor combined with his slight edge over Helen Clark in the Attractiveness category be enough to overcome the margin she has over him on the Success scale only time will tell.

Of course John Key could take Professor Wiseman's research and put it to good use by changing his first name to James, Which not only tops the Success scale for males (13.0) but also scores highly in the other  two categories as well (5.6 and 8.4 respectively).

James  Key, works for me.

But then again Helen Clark could respond by dropping her first name and using her middle name Elizabeth which tops the list in the success factor for females.

Sadly, it would do little to help her in the  Luck or Attractiveness  departments  though.

Comments

[Peter Bickle]

What about the results for Mohammed, Mustafa, Ahmed. These are popular western world names now.

[belt]

Haven't you called a help desk lately Peter? They're all John, Bob, Jack, Paul, etc. Or that's what they tell me.

[peter]

A lot of Help Desk and Customer service operators appear to be from the Philippines.