ATTITUDES AND SOCIAL COGNITION We Look Like Our Names: The Manifestation of Name Stereotypes in Facial Appearance Yonat Zwebner The Hebrew University of Jerusalem Anne-Laure Sellier HEC Paris Nir Rosenfeld The Hebrew University of Jerusalem Jacob Goldenberg Interdisciplinary Center (IDC) and Columbia University Ruth Mayo The Hebrew University of Jerusalem Research demonstrates that facial appearance affects social perceptions. The current research investigates the reverse possibility: Can social perceptions influence facial appearance? We examine a social tag that is associated with us early in life— our given name. The hypothesis is that name stereotypes can be manifested in facial appearance, producing a face-name matching effect, whereby both a social perceiver and a computer are able to accurately match a person’s name to his or her face. In 8 studies we demonstrate the existence of this effect, as participants examining an unfamiliar face accurately select the person’s true name from a list of several names, significantly above chance level. We replicate the effect in 2 countries and find that it extends beyond the limits of socioeconomic cues. We also find the effect using a computer-based paradigm and 94,000 faces. In our exploration of the underlying mechanism, we show that existing name stereotypes produce the effect, as its occurrence is culture-dependent. A self-fulfilling prophecy seems to be at work, as initial evidence shows that facial appearance regions that are controlled by the individual (e.g., hairstyle) are sufficient to produce the effect, and socially using one’s given name is necessary to generate the effect. Together, these studies suggest that facial appearance represents social expectations of how a person with a specific name should look. In this way a social tag may influence one’s facial appearance. Keywords: face perception, naming, self-fulfilling prophecy, social influence, stereotypes Supplemental materials: http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/pspa0000076.supp We are told not to judge a book by its cover, but we all do. Facial appearance matters when we judge people: It affects how a person is perceived and judged by others regarding critical char- acteristics such as intelligence, trustworthiness, attractiveness, warmth, dominance, and so forth (Ballew & Todorov, 2007; Bar, Neta, & Linz, 2006; Berry, 1991; Berry & Brownlow, 1989; Penton-Voak, Pound, Little, & Perrett, 2006; Rule & Ambady, 2008; Todorov, 2008; Willis & Todorov, 2006). Could it also be the other way around? Can the way people judge us affect how we look? Up to now, research has mainly focused on how social perceptions are influenced by facial appear- ance (Oosterhof & Todorov, 2008; Todorov, Said, Engell, & Oosterhof, 2008; Walker & Vetter, 2016) rather than whether facial appearance can be influenced by social perceptions. We examine this reverse possibility and suggest that the association between faces and social perceptions could be a two-way street. This article was published Online First February 27, 2017. Yonat Zwebner, School of Business Administration, The Hebrew Univer- sity of Jerusalem; Anne-Laure Sellier, Department of Marketing, HEC Paris; Nir Rosenfeld, The Rachel and Selim Benin School of Computer Science and Engineering, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem; Jacob Goldenberg, Arison School of Business, Interdisciplinary Center (IDC), and Visiting Professor at Columbia Business School, Columbia University; Ruth Mayo, Department of Psychology, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. For interested readers, data from all experiments are available at https:// osf.io/ We express our gratitude to Hillel Aviezer, Shai Danziger, Andrew D. Gershoff, Shira Goldenberg, and David Mazursky for insightful comments on previous versions of this paper and project. Finally, we thank Charles M. Judd, Jacob Westfall, and Ariel Goldstein for their advice regarding the mixed model analysis, and Noam Siegelman for his comprehensive assistance with conduct- ing the mixed model analysis. We also thank the HEC Foundation for funding part of this research. This research is part of Yonat Zwebner’s PhD thesis. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Yonat Zwebner, School of Business Administration, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Jerusalem, Israel. E-mail: yonat.zwebner@mail.huji.ac.il Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2017, Vol. 112, No. 4, 527–554 © 2017 American Psychological Association 0022-3514/17/$12.00 http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/pspa0000076 527