HOW attractive are you? The answer could depend partly on your name.
Linguist Amy Perfors of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology placed photos that included prominent names on the “Hot or Not?” website, which allows viewers to rank strangers’ photos. Each photo was posted at different times with different names. She found that men labelled with names including “front vowels” – sounds produced in the front of the mouth such as the “aaa” in Matt – were rated as more attractive than photos labelled with “back vowel” names, such as the “aw” sound in Paul. The opposite was true for…
