A series of experiments carried out by researchers from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem found people were able to pick someone’s name, from a choice of five, with “above chance” accuracy — three times in 10 — going off appearances alone.
Computers fed named faces were better, picking the right name from a set of 15 common monikers more than 50 percent of the time.
The researchers said their results, published in 2017, showed how people often conformed to the stereotype associated with their name. A Daisy, for example, was more likely to dress and act in a feminine manner, and that’s what people (and computers) were able to pick up.
Common sense, you say. But often the best science is.
Before moving to Gisborne for work late last year, I hadn’t given the name Poverty Bay a second thought. It represented a location on a map, a far-flung (to a kid from Whanganui) corner of New Zealand where some guy named James Cook had tried and failed to restock his boat after getting on the wrong side of the people already living there. Sure, it was where the British explorer first made landfall in Aotearoa way back in 1769, but the name he gave it was just a name, right?
Wrong.
Although Cook may have been left high and dry, Turanganui-a-Kiwa (the great standing place of Kiwa) was by all accounts anything but impoverished. With rich fishing grounds and forested plains, marae in the area enjoyed an abundance of food and resources.
Yet the name ordained by Cook stuck, and I can’t help wondering if it has had an influence on the area’s fortunes.
The Gisborne district is still home to a decent share of nature’s bounty — famous for its citrus, wine and sweetcorn, and with a booming forestry sector — but it also has high levels of deprivation. I see that as I bike to work each day and pass under Peel Street Bridge, a makeshift shelter for the destitute. Homelessness is not unique to Gisborne, but the country’s worst rates of avoidable death and disease are.
What got me thinking about the name was news of the Government’s decision to recognise both Maori and English titles for Turanganui-a-Kiwa/Poverty Bay.
A similar ruling was made for my home town in 2009 after tangata whenua explained that Whanganui without the H was meaningless. With the H it means big bay, but the local dialect meant European settlers heard and recorded the name as Wanganui.
There was plenty of dissent at the time, most noticeably from the district’s then-mayor, former talkback host Michael Laws, who argued the change made void the history of Whanganui without the H, as it had been for more than 150 years.
But don’t we want to move on from colonialism rather than perpetuate it?
The answer in this case was “yes”.
In 2015, with Mr Laws no longer at the helm, the district was gazetted as Whanganui, and now even the local newspaper, which first went to print in 1856, has the H in its masthead.
Eventually the iwi’s argument won out, but it took time, and I think it may be so for Turanganui-a-Kiwa/Poverty Bay.
Like in Whanganui, the push to recognise the bay’s Maori name has come from the community, and it has taken a while to get to this point after Kaiti School pupils submitted a petition to Gisborne District Council calling for the change in 2013.
Principal Billie-Jean Potaka-Ayton put it beautifully when she told Maori Television: “We’re not poor — we’ve got our reo, we have our land, we have our whanau, we have our community . . . that’s what makes us feel rich, and Poverty Bay doesn’t reflect that.”
Like in Whanganui, not everyone agreed — with a quarter of the more than 600 submissions on the dual-name proposal seeking the status quo.
But we all know change is hard, as Mayor Meng Foon so eloquently explained after councillors, bar Malcolm MacLean, voted to put forward the dual name for government approval: “I have problems choosing what I’m going to have for dinner with my wife.”
Maybe, hopefully, the name Poverty Bay is now on borrowed time.
Just what the name for the area beyond the bay should be, well, that’s a whole ’nother topic.
