Our given name is a social tag associated with us early in life. Prior research has shown that individuals’ facial appearance can be indicative of their given names. New research probes the origins of this face-name matching effect: whether names are given based on innate facial characteristics or whether individuals’ facial appearance changes to match their name over time. Using both humans and machine learning algorithms, the findings indicate that while adults demonstrate congruence between their facial appearance and name, this pattern is not observed in children nor in children’s faces digitally aged to adult appearance.
Zwebner et al. investigated the possibility of a self-fulfilling prophecy effect wherein individuals’ facial appearance develops over time to resemble the social stereotypes associated with given names. Image credit: Zwebner et al., doi: 10.1073/pnas.2405334121.
“George Orwell famously said: ‘At 50, everyone has the face he deserves’,” said Reichman University researcher Yonat Zwebner and colleagues.
“Research supports Orwell’s observation, suggesting that changes in facial appearance over the years might be affected by one’s personality and behaviors.”
“Our current work aims to explicitly test the developmental aspect of facial appearance, with the focus on a social process by utilizing a recently identified effect, the face-name matching effect, which suggests that given names can be manifested in facial appearance.”
In the study, the authors asked 9- to 10-year-old children and adults to match individuals’ faces to names.
The findings revealed that both the children and the adults correctly matched adult faces to their corresponding names, significantly above the chance level.
However, when it came to children’s faces and names, the participants were unable to make accurate associations.
In another part of the study, a machine learning system was fed a large database of images of human faces.
The computer recognized that the representations of the faces of adults with the same name were significantly more similar to each other than the representations of faces of adults with different names.
Conversely, no significant similarity was found among children with the same name compared to children with different names.
The researchers concluded that the similarity between a person’s face and their name results from a self-fulfilling prophecy.
The facial appearance changes over a long period of time to align with social stereotypes associated with the name.
Such stereotypes can be formed in many ways, for example because the name is linked to a famous figure or due to the connotations of a Biblical name.
“Our research highlights the broader significance of this surprising effect — the profound impact of social expectations,” Dr. Zwebner said.
“We have demonstrated that social constructs, or structuring, do exist — something that until now has been almost impossible to test empirically.”
“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.”
The results were published this month in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
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Yonat Zwebner et al. 2024. Can names shape facial appearance? PNAS 121 (30): e2405334121; doi: 10.1073/pnas.2405334121
