Stelter Marleen, Degner Juliane
Department of Social Psychology, Universität Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany.
Front Psychol. 2018 Apr 13;9:486. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2018.00486. eCollection 2018.
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 ( = 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.
一个人的名字可能会激活社会类别信息，研究表明，这在各种情况下都会导致刻板印象和歧视。然而，以往没有研究调查过名字对更基本的人物感知过程的影响。我们进行了七项实验研究，考察名字对面部识别的影响，即对外群体效应（即识别外群体面孔的相对困难程度）的影响。美国白人参与者完成了在线识别任务，任务中呈现白人内群体面孔以及黑人或中国人外群体面孔。外群体面孔呈现时搭配典型的外群体名字或典型的白人名字；白人面孔呈现时搭配典型的白人名字或不常见的名字。我们预期，与搭配典型外群体名字的外群体面孔相比，搭配典型白人名字的外群体面孔能得到更好的识别。通过进行内部元分析，我们观察到总体上有一个虽小但显著的效应（= 0.11）。然而，七项研究的结果模式并不一致。鉴于特别是那些高功效的预先注册研究并未显示出效应，我们建议对该效应的解读应谨慎。我们讨论了一个小效应可能对现实生活以及外群体效应理论仍具有重要意义，强调了未来关于名字典型性对群体间面部感知影响的研究的重要性。
