A new study has found that people tend to alter their appearance to suit their names. For the study, published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers asked 9-to-10-year-old children and adults to match faces with names. They found that both age groups showed a notable ability to successfully pair adult faces with their correct names, performing significantly better than random chance. However, when it came to matching names with children's faces, the accuracy of their associations dropped considerably, the study revealed.
"We have demonstrated that social constructs, or structuring, do exist - something that until now has been almost impossible to test empirically," explained Yonat Zwebner, the study author and a marketing expert from the Reichman University in Israel.
"Social structuring is so strong that it can affect a person's appearance. These findings may imply the extent to which other personal factors that are even more significant than names, such as gender or ethnicity, may shape who people grow up to be," Mr Zwebner said.
The study authors noted that previous research has found evidence that a person's facial appearance is suggestive of their given name. However, it wasn't clear if that was because people were given names to match their innate facial features as babies or if their appearance developed over time to better suit their birth name.
Now, the new study has tested this nature using human participants. In one test, children between the ages of 8 to 12 and adults over the age of 18 were asked to match the faces and names of children and adults in a multiple-choice test. The researchers found that both young and old participants were equally as good at matching adult faces to their corresponding names. However, they could not do the same for the photographs of children aged 9 or 10.
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In a follow-up test, machine learning algorithms were also trained to process a larger collection of facial image data. The algorithms also found that adults with the same name tend to look more similar to each other than adults with different names.
"Together, these findings suggest that even our facial appearance can be influenced by a social factor such as our name, confirming the potent impact of social expectations," the study authors wrote.
The researchers concluded that given names at birth are "social tags" that can affect a person's appearance through a self-fulfilling prophecy. As the years go by, people may internalise the characteristics and expectations associated with their names, embracing them "consciously or unconsciously, in their identity and choices," they explained.
"We are social creatures who are affected by nurture: One of our most unique and individual physical components, our facial appearance, can be shaped by a social factor, our name," they wrote.
