Do you think your son's destiny would be the same if Jonathan is called Borja? What is different about those names? Well, in our environment, one name is associated with low social classes and another with high social classes, although this has not always been the case and of course there are people who call themselves with those names in both strata.
Each country and each era has its own names with connotative, subjective senses, which make them ascribe to one or another area. Or, what is the same, names that they sound rich and names that they sound poor, among other positive or negative prejudices.
A study published in 2009 by Julia Kube, at the University of Oldenburg (Germany), which offered a list of proper names associated with negative prejudices and another related to positive prejudices, suggests that a student's own name influences their school grades.
Of course, only if this is a male. Logically, this influence is only perceived in the grades based on the teacher's criteria, not in objective grades.
The same exams were given to 200 different professors, except for one difference: or it was signed by a positive connotative charge name or by a negative connotative charge name. In Germany, names like Kevin, Mandy or Cedric are linked to lower social strata; on the contrary, names like Maximilian, Jakob or Simon are linked to higher social strata.
The results showed how works signed by names like Maximiliam or Simon were better rated than those signed by Kevin or Mandy, despite the fact that the content of the text was identical.
What happens is that teachers could not prevent an automatic, unconscious part of themselves from applying a certain bias to the exam.
Curiously, qualification differences were only observed in male names, between Kevin and Maximilian, for example, and not between Celine and Charlotte, which, according to the researchers, indicates that men suffer more prejudices because they are believed to have a tendency to be more restless and more easily break the rules.
Obviously, studies like these should not make us check the list of names we had for the baby so that he gets better grades in the future.
I am sure that any Jonathan, Kevin or any Borja Mari who has the backing of his family and his environment behind him, who is encouraged to develop his potential and accompanied by his needs for it, will not be a worse student than another.
