Posted on 06/14/2025 5:00:37 PM PDT by fwdude
I’ve done online searches to see if there is any veracity to this seemingly strong tendency in the black population to fail to note, remember, or use names of others who come across their path, at least not people who are celebrities. I call it “name blindness,” after another psychological phenomenon known and “face blindness.” This tendency doesn’t seem to be limited to specific sociological strata in the black population, but seems to be extant throughout.
I’ve noticed this in college classes, where professors names are not remembered or used, on online forums and in debates and speeches, where black presenter seem to resort to pronouns to refer to a person in question.
My interest is in sociological phenomena and this seems to be consistent across generations and socioeconomic groups. Does anyone know of any scholarly studies on this, or is this question not allowed to be asked, buried by political correctness?
But this is about name recognition / recall.
Any average person who is more or less "hep" can easily reel off the names of 150 Hollywood celebrities. And that's even before you ask them about people they actually know.
I think that fwdude ought to explore this further.
Regards,
You from Butte, Montana? Nome, Alaska? Wichita, Kansas?
Yeah, then it might be a "location thing."
Regards,
On a subconscious level, you understand that the characters' names are mere artifices, so don't really try to commit them to memory.
On the other hand...
I bet that you can easily recall the names of the protagonists of the following fictional works:
Regards,
People are built to only know 150 people. Even in a large city, the average person’s social circle is about that size.
I would bet that he is 600% more likely to have served time in prison or been shot.
Even if the probability is only, say, 24% for the guy with the apostrophe, the likelihood of a random person with no apostrophe having served time in prison is perhaps only 4.3%.
So having the apostrophe in one's name increases the chance by a factor of six.
Regards,
You are refusing to acknowledge my differentiating between "people you know" (nuclear family members, extended family members, good friends, casual acquaintances, nodding acquaintances) and name recognition.
fwguy specifically made this about name recall - incl. the names of fictional characters in novels, etc.
People are indeed "built" to know only about 150 other persons. But that is an entirely different issue than the one we are discussing here.
An average Westerner with an average knowledge of Pop Culture, etc., will be easily able to recall literally hundreds of names - of celebrities, fictional characters, etc. - given even only the slightest prompt (i.e., "The big, strong but dumb country hayseed nephew on Beverly Hillbillies.")
fwbro should realize this.
Unless he is genuinely suffering from some neurological disorder, I am certain that fwman could reel off literally hundreds of names.
Regards,
I don’t think I’ve refused anything. We are talking about knowing people, not names that are blared in lights 24/7.
You will know more names, but not people, if were taught names all during your formative years, but that’s not the same as knowing people.
You are correct, we can know a list of names that are a mile lone, but we won’t know them.
People that we know are about 150 in number. It’s called the Dunbar number, because the gentleman in question noted that brain size could be correlated with the size of your social network.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar‘s_number
It’s also a useful tool, if you want to advance your career, because such knowledge will help you to drop people off when you have to get to know new people.
fwdawg very clearly established the topic of this thread by postulating that Black people (spec. professors, lecturers, and the like) might have greater difficulty recalling names of people whom they reference (e.g., in the context of presenting a college lecture).
I’ve noticed this in college classes, where professors' names are not remembered or used, on online forums and in debates and speeches, where black presenter seem to resort to pronouns to refer to a person in question.He proposed calling it name blindness.
Now, the scenarios he listed were rather specific - too specific, I feel (college classroom environment; a debate where the speaker might only just have been told the other persons' names, etc.) - but also too vague (just who are the "persons in question?" Audience members? Or prestigious scholars and noted researchers to whom the lecturer might be referring?
It might be that the Black presenters / speakers simply hadn't bothered to memorize the names of the course participants. But if they can't recall the names of scientists, researchers, etc. they are referencing in their lectures... That's a different case.
I would also observe that online interactions should be considered a totally separate category. Without a face, an annoying gesticulation, an accent, etc. to associate with a name, our memories are left in the lurch. We have not evolved to associate persons with written names.
My gawd: We here at FR can't even associated names with sexes, by and large! Not everyone is so considerate as fwmale, whose screenname reflects his sex.
Regards,
when you dont have all the parts. you use what you can...
that in a nutshell is what is happening here...
“An inability to remember names is called nominal aphasia,”
Dr. I.M. Kooky, MS, (Brainiology(, Phd, (Craniology)
“It’s called a ‘room temperature IQ,’ in a meat locker.”
The rest of us
My name blindness can be terrible at times. My ancestry is European and American Indian/Native American/First Peoples/First Nations/We Got Here First/Whatever.
Lived in the heavily integrated mid-states east coast and vacationed in the largely black south my whole life. Have never noticed this.
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