Nominative determinism is the hypothesis that people tend to gravitate toward jobs or interests that match their names. The term appeared in the magazine New Scientist in 1994, after its Feedback column noticed scientific papers by researchers with fitting names, such as a polar explorer named Snowman and urologists named Splatt and Weedon. The psychologist Carl Jung suggested a version of the idea long before, citing Sigmund Freud, whose name means joy. A proposed mechanism is implicit egotism, the unconscious preference for things we associate with ourselves, though recent studies on the topic have been challenged on their methods.

In 1909 D. W. Griffith made a 14-minute film about a speculator who corners the wheat market and doubles the price of bread. A farmer sows his field while a 'Wheat King' gambles in the Chicago wheat pit; bakers raise the loaf from five cents to ten and the poor line up for bread. Griffith cut back and forth between the farm, the feast and the breadline, a technique called parallel editing, so audiences saw both ends of the economy at once. The film drew on Frank Norris's stories and on a real scheme: months earlier Chicago financier James Patten had cornered wheat, sent bread prices up and made about $5 million, roughly $185 million today.