Your Name Might Shape Your Face
A computer analysis found that people with the same name were more likely to share a stereotypical “look” to them…. similar expressions around their eyes and mouths, areas of the face.
In one experiment, scientists found that when people are shown a stranger’s face and a choice of five names, they pick the right name about 35 percent of the time.
That’s actually pretty good. According to a psychologist at Brock University in Canada, “Random chance would be 20 percent.” Though she says that more work needs to be done before she’s convinced another reason, like that some name options are unpopular, isn’t responsible for the result.
The team ran several more experiments with different conditions and continued finding that study participants – and one computer algorithm – could reliably match names to faces.
And in another experiment, the researchers trained a computer to find similarities in thousands of faces of people with the same name. The algorithm found that people with the same name tend to have similarities around their eyes or at the corners of their mouths. “You can see it’s the places with different expressions or most of our expressions”. Using that information, the robot could match a face to the correct name about 60 percent of the time when given two options.
Researchers speculate that people might be using their facial muscles to conform appearance to name. Imagine someone with the name “Joy,” for instance. “The moment she’s born, her parents and society treat her in a way that befits that name. The say, you really are so joyful, smiling just like your name. She develops a certain look maybe because she is smiling more because of all the positive feedback she gets when she smiles.”
It may also be that people mold their names to fit them. A psychologist and neuroscientist was told her first name didn’t fit her. So she used her middle name. “That may be because they weren’t matching the stereotype.”
However, there could be other explanations for the correlation between faces and names.
For one, maybe it’s that one or two of the five names the researchers chose were unpopular or a terrible match for the face that study participants saw. “Nobody would pick [those], but picked the other three names equally often, then they would still pick my name about 35 percent of the time.”
