People with traditional names may live longer: study

The study, one of the first to find benefits of having a racially distinctive name, examined three million death certificates from 1802 to 1970

Having a traditional name may add upto a year to your life, suggests a new study that found black men with historically distinctive names, such as Elijah and Moses, lived a year longer.

The study, one of the first to find benefits of having a racially distinctive name, examined 3 million death certificates from 1802 to 1970.

Other studies that looked at current black names such as Jamal and Lakisha suggest that having these modern-day monikers leads to discrimination.

"A number of studies indicate that modern black names can act as a burden, whereas our findings show that historical black names conveyed a large advantage over a person's lifetime," said Lisa D Cook, associate professor at Michigan State University.

Using historical death certificate data from four states - Alabama, Illinois, Missouri and North Carolina - the researchers previously established the existence of a set of distinctive names given to black men, mainly in the early 20th century. The names range from Abraham to Booker to Isaac.

The current study examined mortality rates among men with those names. It found that having a distinctive black name added more than one year of life relative to other black males.

The researchers ruled out socioeconomic and environmental factors such as single-parent households, education and occupation.

"A whole additional year on their lives, in mortality terms, is remarkable," Cook said.

Many of the distinctive names come from the Bible and possibly denote empowerment. Cook said one theory is that men with these Old Testament names may have been held to a higher standard in academic and other activities, even implicitly, and had stronger family, church or community ties.

These stronger social networks could help a person weather negative events throughout life.

"I think the teachers in these one-room schoolhouses - teachers who also taught Sunday school - probably placed implicit expectations on students with these distinctive names," Cook said.

"And I think that gave them a status that they otherwise would not have had," she said.

On the contrary, previous research has found that having distinctive modern names such as Tremayne and Tanisha has led to discrimination among job applicants, college students seeking mentors and researchers seeking federal funding.

"When people see a name that's foreign or strange to them in their profession, implicitly they shut down, as previous studies have shown," Cook said.

The study appears in the journal Explorations in Economic History.