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Can attaching the name Amy to a face decrease its allure? © Alamy |
Name game increases sex appeal
The right name can affect how others rate your looks.
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If you're a loser in the dating game, your
name might be part of the problem. New research has revealed that the vowel
sounds in your name could influence how others judge the attractiveness of your
face.
Amy Perfors, a cognitive scientist at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who carried out the study, believes the
effect is subconscious. Observers unwittingly deem others better looking if they
have the right moniker, she says.
Perfors made the discovery by posting pictures
of 24 friends on hotornot.com, a website that allows users to award marks out of
ten for others' attractiveness. Names are not usually displayed with the
pictures, but for her experiment Perfors made sure that a name (not necessarily
a truthful one) was displayed in the photo's upper corner.
She later posted the same photographs with
different names, and once again collected the feedback. Average scores for the
faces changed depending on the name they were given, Perfors told the annual
meeting of the Cognitive Science Society last week in Chicago, Illinois.
Recipe for success
So what are the ingredients of a sexy name? For
boys, a good name will contain vowel sounds made at the front of the mouth, such
as 'e' or 'i' sounds; names with fuller, rounder vowel sounds such as 'u' tend
to score lower. So pat yourself on the back if you're called Ben... but if your
name is Paul you might have to work harder to snare a date.
The opposite is true for girls, Perfors found.
Women with round-sounding names such as Laura tended to score higher than those
with smaller vowel sounds. "Unfortunately for me, Amy is one of the bad
names," Perfors laments.
The finding that men with 'small-sounding' names
are attractive might seem counterintuitive, Perfors admits. "Front-mouth
vowels imply smallness," she says. "But when girls are looking for
mates, they don't necessarily want a super testosterone-charged guy. They want
someone who will hang around and be a provider."
All the Pauls and Amys out there shouldn't worry
unduly, Perfors adds. "If you are a good-looking person with a bad name you
are still more attractive than an unattractive person with a good name."
Top tomboys
Perfors also found that the cultural
connotations of a name could influence how attractive people find those with
such names. She asked people to rate the 'masculinity' or 'femininity' of
different names, to see whether this affected subjects' scores on the website.
Predictably, guys with the names deemed most
masculine tended to score highest. Names were generally judged masculine because
they contained strong consonants such as 'b' and 'k'. But girls scored higher
when they had either a very feminine or a strongly masculine name; names judged
to be somewhere in the middle scored worst.
The finding seems say that guys need a rugged
name to impress the ladies, whereas being a tomboy is cool for girls. "So
much of our culture says that tomboy stuff is ok, but wimpy guys are not,"
Perfors says.
Perfors argues that the discovery that vowel
sounds can influence a person's perceived attractiveness is the more interesting
finding, because it seems to be a subconscious effect. Experts, including the
Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, have previously argued that vowel sounds
are arbitrary building blocks with no intrinsic meaning.
Which brings us to the most pressing question of
all: is my own name, Mike, a help or a hindrance when it comes to
attractiveness? "Mike is a front vowel sound, so it's a good name,"
says Perfors. "If you do badly with the ladies you can't blame it on your
name."