A new app uses psychology to help expecting parents find a baby name they’ll truly cherish.
Chooze was designed around the concept that people are intimately affected by emotional associations they have with names.
“Baby names are a challenging journey for every expectant parent, and there’s never been any technology that helps them pick,” said Chooze co-founder Ittay Hayut. “Chooze helps parents navigate the top names they’re considering and feel more confident about a decision that will affect them each and every time they say their child’s name.”
It works by allowing the parents to jot down a small list of baby names they would consider their favorites and a few that are tiebreakers. Then, they plug them into the app, which will ask the parents a series of questions to determine possible associations to each name.
The goal is to identify if the parents have positive or negative associations with the possible baby names.
“Chooze measures and tests the speed of association to determine the future parents’ emotional connection to specific baby names,” the company said in a press release. “The end result is a scientifically based calculation of true name preferences.”
That’s a pretty big promise from an iPhone app, but the developers did partner with two cognitive psychologists: Dr. Eran Chajut, professor of Cognitive Psychology at the Open University in Israel, and Dr. Ran Hassin, former head of the Cognitive Science Department at Hebrew University.
“Together, inspired by a vast field of cognitive research dealing with people’s subconscious preferences, they applied cognitive psychology to baby names,” the team said in a statement.
The app costs less than $2 and could save expectant parents hours they would have spent scrolling through Google hunting for the perfect moniker.
