Abstract
A person’s name may activate social category information, which has been shown to lead to stereotyping and discrimination in various contexts. However, no previous research has investigated the influence of names on more basic processes of person perception. We present a set of seven experimental studies examining the influence of names on face recognition, namely, on the other-race effect (i.e., the relative difficulty to recognize outgroup faces). White-American participants completed online recognition tasks with White ingroup faces and Black or Chinese outgroup faces. Outgroup faces were presented with typical outgroup names versus typical White names; White faces were presented with typical White names versus infrequent names. We expected better recognition of outgroup faces with typical White names compared to outgroup faces with typical outgroup names. Employing an internal meta-analysis, we observe overall evidence of a small but significant effect (dz = 0.11). However, the pattern of results across the seven studies is inconsistent. Given that particularly the high-powered pre-registered studies did not show an effect, we suggest that the effect should be interpreted with caution. We discuss that a small effect may still have important implications for real life as well as for theories of the ORE, emphasizing the importance of future research regarding the influence of name typicality on inter-group face perception.
Highlights
Imagine that you are about to meet someone for the first time, and the only information you have in advance is that the person’s given name is Dylan
We investigated the influence of name typicality on the other-race effect (ORE) in a series of seven studies, examining if participants are better at remembering outgroup faces with typical ingroup names compared to outgroup faces with typical outgroup names
We conducted three studies investigating the influence of name typicality on the ORE in face recognition
Summary
Imagine that you are about to meet someone for the first time, and the only information you have in advance is that the person’s given name is Dylan. Numerous social psychological studies document that merely knowing a person’s name activates a wealth of expectations, for example, regarding the individual’s ethnic group membership or socio-economic status (e.g., Young et al, 1993; Fryer and Levitt, 2004). We examine if typical versus untypical names modulate the so-called other-race effect (ORE)—the well-documented memory effect that people are better at recognizing ingroup faces compared to outgroup faces. We investigate this question in the context of the United States, where many given names are distinctively associated with different ethnic groups (see Tzioumis, 2015).
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