What’s in a name?

Would Hillary Clinton have beaten Donald Trump in the American presidential elections in 2016, if she would have had a less round shaped face? This is what studies on the Kiki-Bouba effect discussed in my blog last week implicitly suggest. For when I searched for information on the Kiki-Bouba effect for that blog, I saw that it is not an isolated phenomenon. It is an effect with social implications. This became clear to me, when I read a research article by David N. Barton and Jamin Halberstadt. It will be the main source for my present blog (see Source below).
Barton and Halberstadt wondered whether there is a connection between a personal name and the kind of face that you think that belongs to that name, or rather what kind of shape the face of a person named so and so should have. Or, the other way round, what kinds of name would best fit persons with round faces or persons with angular faces. In short, the researchers wanted to know whether there is a kind of Kiki-Bouba effect between name and face shape. So should Bob have a round face and Kirk have an angular face?
In order to investigate this question, Barton and Halberstadt selected names that require rounding of the mouth to pronounce like Paul, Bob and George and names that require a more angular shaping of the mouth like Pete, Kirk and Mickey, and they took differently shaped faces (rounded or angular; the researchers used only male names and male faces). Then they combined arbitrarily names and faces or had test persons make name-face combinations. The researchers did several tests such as asking test persons to rank order names in terms of their suitability for ten rounded and ten angular male face caricatures, when the name-face combinations were given; to give the selected names to the faces; etc. The result of the tests was unequivocal and significant: Rounded names should belong to rounded faces and angular names should belong to angular faces. A man with a rounded face should have a name like Paul, Bob or George, and if he had an angular face a good name for him would be Pete, Kirk or Mickey. It is likely that the relationship exists also for female names and female faces.
In view of this result, I am glad that my given name fits the shape of my face. For the connection between name and face is not trivial, but it has social implications. The test persons didn’t only think that name and face should fit, but they also preferred persons with preferred name-face combinations. They liked them more, slightly but consistently. Therefore, Barton and Halberstadt investigated also the political consequences of the name-face relationship. They refer to an article by G. Friedman (2015) that shows “that candidates with extremely well-fitting names won their seats by a larger margin – 10 points – than obtains in most American presidential races, [which] suggests the provocative idea that the relation between perceptual and bodily experience could be a potent source of bias in some circumstances.” Research by the authors themselves shows that “well-named” political candidates who ran for the U.S. Senate between 2000 and 2008 inclusive had an advantage over those with non-congruent names by earning a greater proportion of votes.
In view of all this, Barton and Halberstadt conclude: “People’s 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.” Therefore, it is not too bold to say that, if Mrs. Clinton’s given name wouldn’t have been Hillary, but, say, Rose, she would have won the American presidential elections in 2016. So, don’t say anymore “What’s in a name?” 

Source
Barton, David N.; Jamin Halberstadt, “A social Bouba/Kiki effect: A bias for people whose names match their faces”, in Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, vol. 25 (2018), pp. 1013–1020. Also on website https://link.springer.com/article/10.3758/s13423-017-1304-x