Summary: Researchers examined whether people are judged more positively and even rewarded at the ballot box when their name matches the shape of their face.
Source: Springer.
New research finds that a well-matched name and face can help a politician win more votes.
Researchers David Barton and Jamin Halberstadt of the University of Otago in New Zealand report that people prefer names and faces that match in perceived shape. Published in the journal Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, their work builds on the well-known “bouba/kiki effect”—the tendency for people to associate rounded shapes with rounded-sounding names and angular shapes with sharper-sounding names. The team investigated whether face–name congruence affects everyday social impressions and even electoral outcomes.
Across a series of controlled experiments, Barton and Halberstadt tested whether observers assign names to faces on the basis of shape and whether a match between name and face changes how favorably someone is judged. In the first study, participants chose which of six names best fit each of twenty highly exaggerated caricatured male faces. The caricatures were designed to be clearly round or clearly angular. Participants consistently paired round names such as “George” or “Lou” with rounded faces and angular names such as “Pete” or “Kirk” with angular faces: nine of ten round caricatures and eight of ten angular caricatures were matched according to those shape-based expectations.
In a follow-up experiment using unmanipulated photographs of real male faces, the pattern persisted. Observers assigned shape-congruent names to 14 out of 16 round faces and to 15 out of 16 angular faces. Additional studies assessed affective and evaluative consequences of such matches. When people learned that a person’s name fit the expected shape of their face, they tended to like that person more. Conversely, liking and positive evaluations diminished when names and faces were incongruent with those shape-based expectations.
To explore real-world consequences, the researchers applied their method to political candidates. They calculated “matching scores” for 158 United States Senate candidates by combining independent ratings of facial roundness with independent ratings of name roundness and angularity. The results showed a measurable electoral advantage for candidates whose names fit the apparent shape of their faces. On average, candidates with strongly congruent face–name pairings received about 10 additional percentage points in their elections compared with candidates whose names and faces fit poorly.
“Those with congruent names earned a greater proportion of votes than those with incongruent names,” Barton explains. He notes that a 10-point margin is substantial—larger than the typical margins seen in many high-profile races—and suggests that the relation between perceptual experience and bodily cues can become a potent, if subtle, source of bias in some contexts.
Halberstadt adds, “Overall, our results tell a consistent story. People’s names, like shape names, are not entirely arbitrary labels. Face shapes produce expectations about the names that should denote them, and violations of those expectations carry affective implications, which in turn feed into more complex social judgments, including voting decisions.”
The study highlights how low-level perceptual associations—the same biases that underlie the bouba/kiki effect—can extend into significant social domains such as interpersonal liking and political choice. By showing consistent linking between facial shape and name perception across caricatures, photographs, and electoral data, the research suggests that seemingly trivial details can influence first impressions and, in aggregate, public behavior.
These findings raise important questions about how subtle, unconscious cues shape evaluations of people in everyday life and in civic processes. They point to the need for further research on the mechanisms that translate perceptual expectations into affective reactions and on whether similar effects operate across cultures, genders, and different types of names and faces.
Source: Elizabeth Hawkins – Springer
Image Source: NeuroscienceNews.com image is in the public domain.
Original Research: The study will be published in Psychonomic Bulletin & Review.
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MLA: Springer. “Does Your Name Match Your Face?.” NeuroscienceNews. 8 June 2017.
APA: Springer (2017, June 8). Does Your Name Match Your Face?. NeuroscienceNews. Retrieved June 8, 2017.
Chicago: Springer. “Does Your Name Match Your Face?.” (accessed June 8, 2017).