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Summary In social contexts, faces and facial expressions are used to communicate between people and to express one’s identity. One’s identity is partly shaped by the given name a person receives from their parents, and can be seen as a social tag. Both faces and names are prone to several stereotypes, biases and prejudice. It has been established that a person’s appearance has an influence on the social perceptions by others. Zwebner et al. (2017), however, propose that this is not a one-way influence but that social perceptions also influence the appearance of a person. They argue that people, at least somewhat, change their appearance to fit their name and that people of the same culture have shared schemas of what a person with a certain name looks like. This would mean that people should be able to match a name to a face, better than chance level. This thesis is based on the face-name matching effect as proposed by Zwebner et al. (2017). They found that people are able to match the correct name, among distractor names, to a presented face above chance. The first goal of this thesis was to replicate this effect. We invited participants to select the correct name, out of four given names, to match a presented face. Unlike Zwebner et al. (2017), we did not find evidence for the face-name matching effect. The second goal was to clarify whether different methodologies give the same results. In our second study, participants had to choose the correct face among four options to match a given name, similar to the methodology of Kramer and Jones (2015). Once again, people were not able to choose the correct face above chance level, which is consistent with the results of Kramer and Jones (2015). According to Zwebner et al. (2017), the face-name matching effect is based on shared schemas, which only exist among people of the same culture. Our third goal, thus, was to analyse whether our results would differ when we only included faces from people with the Belgian nationality in the analyses. In neither of the experiments did this yield evidence for the face-name matching effect. Our last goal was to identify whether the average perceived familiarity of a certain name among the tested population, could predict how often a name would be chosen on average. We tested this model and found that familiarity of a name predicts the average proportion of name choices when people have to match a name to a presented face. We conclude that the face-name matching effect did not generalize to our participant pool and stimulus set. We reason that the homogenous stimulus set and the overall young age of participants and stimuli might be causing factors. Noticeable differences were apparent between stimuli, in that some people indeed might look like their name while others do not. The choice of distractor names might explain this difference, such that unfamiliar distractor names make the task easier (and vice versa). Another reasoning might be that some people do not look like their name, because they reject their name as a social tag and adapt their appearance such that it does not fit their name. Future research should further unravel these hypotheses and look into the potential underlying mechanisms of the effect.
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