Category: Social psychology

People prefer it when your name matches your face.

People tend to prefer names and faces that seem to go naturally together.

Names that have a round sound, requiring rounding of the mouth, like “Lou”, go better with round faces.

Angular-sounding names, such as “Peter”, tend to suit more angular faces.

Psychologists tested this by having people look at pairs of names and faces.

Sometimes the names matched the faces (round name, round face) and sometimes not (round name, angular face).

They found that people prefer it when names and faces matches.

The researchers then took the idea a step further.

Perhaps people would be more likely to vote for political candidates whose names matched their faces?

Mr David Barton, the study’s first author, explained the results:

“Those with congruent names earned a greater proportion of votes than those with incongruent names.

The fact that candidates with extremely well-fitting names won their seats by a larger margin — 10 points — than is obtained in most American presidential races suggests the provocative idea that the relation between perceptual and bodily experience could be a potent source of bias in some circumstances.”

The “bouba/kiki effect”

The finding is an extension of what psychologists call the “bouba/kiki effect”

To demonstrate this, people are shown the following images and asked which one might be called “bouba” and which one “kiki”.

Over 95 percent of people call the image on the left “kiki” and the image on the right “bouba”.

A spiky name fits a spiky object, while a smooth name fits a smooth one

It’s not just English speakers who do this; one study found that Tamil speakers in India showed the same pattern.

Professor Jamin Halberstadt, who co-authored the study, said:

“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.”

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The study was published in the journal Psychonomic Bulletin & Review (Barton & Halberstadt, 2017).

Social class shapes how capable people think they are — and how others see them.

Overconfidence is a classic signal of higher social class.

People from a higher social class assume they will perform better on cognitive tests, even though they fail to outperform those of a lower social class.

Overconfidence is probably passed down from one generation to the next and also helps people appear more competent.

People interpret this self-belief as reflecting someone’s actual abilities.

This is all despite the fact that people from lower classes do just as well on those tests.

Dr Peter Belmi, the study’s first author, said:

“Advantages beget advantages.

Those who are born in upper-class echelons are likely to remain in the upper class, and high-earning entrepreneurs disproportionately originate from highly educated, well-to-do families.

Our research suggests that social class shapes the attitudes that people hold about their abilities and that, in turn, has important implications for how class hierarchies perpetuate from one generation to the next.”

Measuring overconfidence

For the series of four studies people were given cognitive tests and then asked to estimate their score.

People of higher social class consistently gave themselves higher marks.

In fact, they had done no better than people of lower social class.

This display of overconfidence can be beneficial in job interviews, the research also showed.

When given a mock interview, people of higher social class acted in an overconfident way.

Judges watching the video, though, saw this as reflecting greater competence; in other words, their self-belief impressed others.

Dr Belmi explained:

“Individuals with relatively high social class were more overconfident, which in turn was associated with being perceived as more competent and ultimately more hirable, even though, on average, they were no better at the trivia test than their lower-class counterparts.”

Social roots

Overconfidence among people of a higher social class could be partly down to a difference in values, Dr Belmi said:

“In the middle class, people are socialized to differentiate themselves from others, to express what they think and feel and to confidently express their ideas and opinions, even when they lack accurate knowledge.

By contrast, working-class people are socialized to embrace the values of humility, authenticity and knowing your place in the hierarchy.

These findings challenge the widely held belief that everybody thinks they are better than the average.

Our results suggest that this type of thinking might be more prevalent among the middle and upper classes.”

Related

• Other people can read our social class from our facial features.
• ‘Climbing the social ladder’ is about understanding how people are socially connected.

The study was published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (Belmi et al., 2019).