Does Your Name Influence Your Looks? Survey Says: Yes!
“What’s in a name?” William Shakespeare famously wrote. “That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.”
No offense to Shakespeare, but a new study by Israeli researchers suggests that a person’s name can indeed influence how they look.
Led by Dr. Ruth Mayo and PhD candidate Yonat Zwebner, researchers at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem examined whether a person’s appearance can be influenced by their given name. To do this, they recruited independent observers and showed them color headshot photographs of complete strangers. Then they presented them a list of names and asked them to choose the stranger’s real name based on his or her facial appearance.
In a series of studies reported last week in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, the participants repeatedly beat the odds of correctly identifying a person’s name based on their facial appearance alone. For example, upon looking at one particular face and considering four possible name: Jacob, Dan, Josef or Nathaniel, the observers correctly chose “Dan” 38 percent of the time, significantly above the 25 percent chance level of a random guess. This effect held true even when the researchers controlled for age and ethnicity, implying that something more than simple socioeconomic cues are at work.
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Does Your Name Influence Your Looks? Survey Says: Yes!
Πηγή: nocamels.com
