Everyone wants to give their child a unique name to separate them from the crowd.
This name then becomes the first-ever identity with which a child will be recognized.
Most people develop a personal connection with this identity for the rest of their life,
but does the name actually have any effect on who a person is and who they become?
According to the face-name effect, also known as the Dorian Grey Effect, the answer is yes.
The phenomenon, named after Oscar Wilde’s eponymous hero where his deeds affect his
portrait on the wall, states that external labels such as a name have an internal effect
on self worth, confidence, grooming habits and aesthetic choices.
The physical appearance of the person is what is perceived by others, which further affects
the person’s own self-image and self-worth.
Psychologists see this relationship between the internal factors and the external factors
as the main component in the development of the person and their psyche.
To test if one’s name has a Dorian Grey effect on a person’s personality, researchers
from Hebrew University in Jerusalem performed a study that was published in the Journal
of Personality and Social Psychology.
The paper aptly titled “we look like our names” explores the significance of how
social judgements of a name can positively or negatively impact self perception.
This is the opposite of most research in the field which looks at how appearances influence
social perception.
Social tags have been shown in the past to have an influence on people.
One example would be teachers that put down certain students with harsh labels to create
a self fulfilling prophecy of antisocial behaviour.
However, a name is the ultimate social tag, something that most people don’t even choose
and it is more important to ones identity than just about anything else.
The researchers at Hebrew University conducted eight different studies in two different countries
with different cultural settings to test out their hypothesis.
During each study, the test subjects were shown pictures of strangers and five possible
name options.
Each participant was asked to match the correct name to the face, the name they thought fit
the person’s facial appearance.
For this example, Dan was chosen 38% of the time which is greater than a 1 in 4 random
choice.
Dan was actually his real name too.
Ethnicity, age, and socioeconomic variables for each picture were controlled by the researchers
to achieve the most accurate results.
This variable control ensured that test subjects were picking names for the pictures purely
based on the facial traits.
In each study, test subjects were up to 40 percent accurate in identifying the name of
the person in the picture.
When asked about the phenomenon, the lead author of the study, Dr. Yonat Zwebner said
that when people hear a name, they visualize a face in their mind based on cultural stereotypes
and characteristic traits.
According to their study, people are often statistically accurate to a degree that cannot
be considered pure chance or coincidence.
She also added that this perception of others is especially important to people because
the way one is perceived, even if the perception is only based on a name, affects one’s own
personality.
Most people will develop the personality others perceive to live up to their expectations.
Zebrowitz in 2011 identified that our facial features actually change over the years to
eventually represent our internal expectations of how we should look.
For the lay person this may be dressing a certain way, a change in grooming habits and
a greater inclination to surgically change certain undesirable aspects of the face more
than others.
From Albert Mehrabian’s 2001 paper, we know that social attributes are interpreted from
names.
With 7 trials and multiple repeats, each with a moderate sample size;
1.
Men's names connoted more masculine characteristics, less ethical caring, and more successful characteristics
than did women's names.
2.
Nicknames connoted less successful characteristics, more popular fun, and less ethical caring
characteristics than did given names.
3.
Androgynous names connoted more popular fun and less masculine characteristics for men
and more popular fun, less ethical caring, and more masculine characteristics for women
than did gender-specific names.
4.
Less conventionally spelled names connoted uniformly less attractive characteristics.
So think alternate spellings of less common names E.g.
Crystal, Krystal, Kreestahl, Kristal 5.
For men only, longer names connoted more ethical caring, less popular & fun, more successful,
and less masculine characteristics 6.
More anxiety and neuroticism were attributed to those with less common names.
The choice of name has real social consequences.
A 2004 paper on distinctively black names by Fryer & Levitt found that blacks in white
neighbourhoods choose more anglicized names vs their black neighbourhood counterparts.
As a confounding effect of that, more anglicized black names were found to be easier to pronounce
for the english speaking workplace which provided a socioeconomic boost.
Following from that, Laham et al’s 2012 paper found merit to the name pronunciation
effect, where easier to pronounce names reflect more favourably on appearances, perceived
workplace status and socioeconomic status.
The results were independent of the length of the name or unusualness, typicality or
foreignness indicating that easy phonetic pronunciation of a name seems to be the most
important quality in choosing one.
This particular paper is an anglicized example using Asian international students in Australia
and domestic Australian students but similar effects were found in other parts of the world
in different languages.
What might be difficult to an english speaker might be very easy to pronounce for a non-english
speaker so that it would be rated more favourably to them and vice versa.
The underlying mechanism comes from research in processing fluency, where the subjective
experience of ease or difficulty associated with a cognitive process is linked to positive
or negative emotions.
Think of it as that little dopamine rush you get when you pronounce a difficult name like
saoirse correctly..
You automatically like that person a little bit more for giving you that positive feeling.
The phonological fluency (or ease of pronunciation) isn’t just limited to names.
Alter Et al’s 2006 paper applied this to the stock market finding easier names to perform
better short term and similarly drugs with easy to read names were deemed less risky.
If you google the industry name for a drug and the trade name for it, the trade name
is almost always much simpler.
So what is the right name for a face?
People typically identify individuals by either their face or name, leading to what’s known
as a face-name prototype.
A Dan Sherif would look different to a Liu Ming and whether we’ve met a Dan or Liu
within seconds of hearing those names we’ve already developed an idea of what they might
look like based on previous facial data and experiences.
It’s why difficult or unusual names are less preferred from Mehrabian’s study previously
mentioned, because they provide no facial stereotype to go off of leading to a subtle
fear of the unknown.
When choosing the right name, Kohler’s 1929 paper identified what’s known as the shape-name
fit which is based on the bouba-kiki effect, where the match between an object and a name
is not completely arbitrary and some names just sound ‘off,’ whether it be for a
person or object.
This deserves to be a topic on its own, but if I were to show you these two images, which
one would be Bouba and which one would be Kiki?
These are both nonsensical words but we attribute a certain name to a certain shape more than
the other.
Lea et al s 2007 paper on the topic used the example of names such as ‘Bob’ having
a rounder sound while also being a nickname of robert and so participants expect a more
laidback, passive face.
Unsurprisingly, most people were able to guess correctly out of the two.
These were the majority agreed upon names for a collection of morphed faces in the study.
From another trial, it was found that when these name matches were more and more mismatched,
for instance an Andy who we expect to have a narrow face being labelled as a Justin with
a broad face, participants had considerably more difficulty in remembering the name correctly.
Another nuance is that when the participants are allowed to label faces with their own
selection of names (from the given pool of names) they were much faster and better at
recalling vs when the researchers gave them a randomized set of name-face pairs.
To summarize, there is strong evidence of face-name prototypicality.
Virtually every human being expects common names to look a certain way, and when they
don’t match up, we have difficulty in remembering and associating the face.
The choice of name has significant social importance from workplace discrimination to
socioeconomic success and in general, easier to pronounce names (names that are phonetically
pronounced how they are spelt), whether it be anglicized, ethnic or other are better
irrespective of the length of commonality of the name.
The face-name effect is so prevalent that artificial intelligence algorithms can predict
names far more accurately than humans by finding commonalities in faces with the same name.
Regression analysis of the results, showed that the eyes and greater periocular region
is the most determinant factor that the computer algorithm uses to assign a name.
As for growing into your name, Zwebner et al’s paper suggests it is only a self fulfilling
prophecy when there are facial features that one can control, most commonly hairs styling
and body modifications.
On this self-fulfilling prophecy theory, there is also an element of bias to consider.
For instance, Conrad is a fairly WASPy Caucasian name and so a child with that name would be
more socially acclimated in the West, likely coming from a privileged family and in doing
Western things such as playing American football.
This leads to frequent exercise, social development, health access and higher testosterone which
is responsible for growing into a wider, more masculine face during adolescence.
Perhaps the name had nothing to do with it, but rather it is simply a product of selection
bias.