Social psychology - Page 21 of 29

When Your Name Matches Your Face It’s More Attractive

People prefer it when your name matches your face.

People have a preference for names and faces that go together, research finds.

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

Angular sounding names, like “Peter”, though, go better with more angular faces.

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

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

They found that people prefer it when name and face matches.

The researchers then took it one stage 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”.

Spiky name goes with spiky object and smooth name goes with smooth object.

It’s not just English speakers that do this either, one study found Tamil speakers in India did the same.

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.”

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

Weirdly Eating This Makes Men Smell More Attractive

Women smelled the body odour of some men who’d eaten this and found it more attractive.

First, you better check that it’s not April the 1st.

OK, done. It’s not. Onwards…

Eating garlic — and I mean a lot of garlic — makes men’s body odour smell more attractive, a study finds.

The surprising finding adds to garlic’s established health benefits.

It took the ingestion of four cloves of garlic to do the trick.

Two cloves was simply not enough.

Women smelled the body odour of some men who’d eaten no garlic, some who’d eaten two cloves and some who’d eaten four.

They rated each man’s odour sample for attractiveness, pleasantness, intensity and masculinity.

There is, of course, a fatal flaw to this experiment.

Women did not smell the men’s breath!

This may well have changed the ratings somewhat…

If you are planning to try out the power of garlic, though, look no further than a 2010 volume of the Journal of Food Science (Hansanugrum & Barringer, 2010).

This study found that drinking milk can help prevent garlic breath.

That should help a bit.

So, why does the body odour of garlic smell more attractive to women?

Professor Craig Roberts, who led the study, said it could be related to its health benefits:

“Our results indicate that garlic consumption may have positive effects on the pleasure derived from perceived body odour perhaps due to its health effects.

From an evolutionary perspective, formation of preferences for diet-associated body odours was possibly shaped by means of sexual selection.

Previous research indicates that many animal species use diet-associated cues to select mates in good physical condition.

As the health benefits of garlic consumption include antioxidant, immunostimulant, cardiovascular, bactericidal and anti-cancer effects, it is plausible that human odour preferences have been shaped by sexual selection.

The study was published in the journal Appetite (Fialova et al., 2015).

Smart Women Are Only More Attractive To Men Sometimes — Here’s When

This confirms what smart women always suspected about men.

Men prefer smarter women, but only in theory, a study finds.

When a real living, breathing smarter women is close by, men shy away, preferring women of lower intelligence.

Dr Lora Park, who led the study, said:

“There is a disconnect between what people appear to like in the abstract when someone is unknown and when that same person is with them in some immediate social context.”

The research tested the difference between abstract and actual intelligence.

Dr Park explained the results of the study:

“We found that men preferred women who are smarter than them in psychologically distant situations.

Men rely on their ideal preferences when a woman is hypothetical or imagined.

But in live interaction, men distanced themselves and were less attracted to a woman who outperformed them in intelligence.”

Perhaps we should avoid laying all the blame on men, though.

The study just happened to look at men’s attraction towards women, it didn’t examine women’s attraction towards men.

Dr Park said:

“That’s a question for future research.

But presumably, anyone who is outperformed by someone close to them might feel threatened themselves.

We just happened to look at men in a romantic dating context.”

In the research 650 young adults were given a range of different scenarios in six separate studies.

Some men were only shown profiles of women, others expected to meet women while some actually met women in real life.

Dr Park said:

“In each case, how much you like someone or how much you are attracted to them is affected by how intelligent that person is relative to you and how close that person is relative to you.”

But it’s vital that the quality — in this case intelligence — is important to you, said Dr Park:

“The domain matters.

If you don’t care about the domain, you might not be threatened.

Yet, if you care a lot about the domain, then you might prefer that quality in somebody who is distant, then feel threatened when that person gets close to you.”

So, in this case it seems intelligence really does matter.

The study was published in the journal Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin (Park et al., 2015).