“As you name a ship, so it will float.” This famous phrase from A. Nekrasov's children's story, as it turns out, is also suitable for you and me – the results of a new study have shown that a person's name affects their appearance over time. And although the scientists' findings sound somewhat speculative, they have a solid scientific basis. Thus, the work used machine learning, as well as tests on how people perceive each other. As a result, the researchers found that the faces of adults are much more accurately matched to their names than one might think. But since this effect does not appear on the faces of children, the authors of the study suggested that the correspondence between face and name develops with age, and is not evident from birth. This so-called “self-fulfilling prophecy” shows how social expectations can imperceptibly influence appearance. The results obtained are important for psychology, sociology and artificial intelligence, demonstrating the interaction between social factors and the formation of identity. Let us tell you the details!
Names do influence appearance, but only in adults. Image: cdn.sci.news
A self-fulfilling prophecy is a prediction that indirectly influences reality in such a way that it ultimately turns out to be true.
Contents
- 1 Name and a person's appearance
- 1.1 Key findings
- 2 Psychological experiment
- 3 Why is a name a reflection of a person's face?
Name and a person's appearance
Long before anyone knows what we really look like, we are given a name that we will likely live with for the rest of our lives. But what if your appearance, especially your face, somehow reflects the name you were given at birth? This debate, like that of stereotypes, has long been ongoing – are some human characteristics innate and hereditary, or are they shaped by social expectations? While the influence of heredity is relatively easy to measure, the impact of the environment is much more difficult to isolate and empirically measure.
However, the authors of a new study published in the journal PNAS have achieved a breakthrough by demonstrating the significant influence of society on a person’s life and appearance. Professor Ruth Mayo of the Hebrew University and researchers from the Arison School of Business at Reichmann University have found that this influence is so strong that it can even change a person’s appearance.
What your name is can have a significant impact on how you look. Image: helios-i.mashable.com
Our work, which combines tests of human perception and advanced machine learning techniques, provides new insights into the complex relationship between social expectations and the development of self-identity. It turns out that we are like our names, the paper says.
Building on previous findings that adults' faces are more likely to match their names than expected, Professor Mayo's team wanted to determine whether this correspondence between face and name is present from birth or develops as we get older.
Read even more interesting articles about the most amazing scientific discoveries on our channel in Yandex.Zen! So you will definitely not miss anything interesting!
Key findings
In a groundbreaking psychological experiment conducted by scientists from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, children and adults aged 9 to 10 were asked to match faces with names. The results showed that both children and adults correctly matched adult faces with the corresponding names, but when it came to children's faces and names, the participants could not make accurate associations.
It seems that choosing a name for a child should be taken very seriously. Image: images.sbs.com.au
In another part of the study, the machine learning system was fed a large database of images of human faces. The computer recognized that images of adults with the same name were significantly more similar to each other than images of adults with different names. Conversely, there was no significant similarity between children with the same name compared to children with different names.
- Both adults and children could accurately match adult faces to their names.
- Neither adults nor children could match children's faces to their names.
- The machine learning algorithms found greater similarity between images of adults with the same name compared to images of people with different names.
Read also: You can learn a person's name just by looking at their face
Psychological experiment
So, no matter how crazy the researchers' findings may seem, each person's face can actually be shaped by their name. It turns out that Katya really does look like Katya, Petya like Petya, and so on. In fact, the new data may finally confirm all those strange, usually seemingly unfounded assumptions that arise in you when you first hear someone's name.
In the study, the researchers found that when people were shown a stranger's face, they chose the correct name from five offered names about 35% of the time. According to one of the study's co-authors, social psychologist Jonat Zwebner, in addition to the fact that the study participants chose the correct name more than a third of the time, they continued to match faces with the correct names in a series of other experiments under different conditions.
The similarity between a person's face and their name is the result of the so-called “self-fulfilling prophecy”. Image: pbs.twimg.com
We did over a dozen studies, and each time we had the feeling that maybe this wouldn't work this time, but it did. It was really surprising,” Zwebner says.
Finding these connections led the researchers to conclude that there is a real connection between your name and how you look. «Taken together, these studies suggest that facial appearance reflects social expectations of what a person with a certain name should look like. Thus, such a «social mark» how a name affects a person’s appearance,” the article says.
Don’t miss: Why is modern society consumed by stress?
Why is a name a reflection of the face?
But how exactly do our names shape our faces? According to the study, there are a few possibilities. First, a person’s personality, which is influenced by the stereotypes associated with their name and how people treat them as a result, can actually affect their face. This happens, for example, when people who are short-tempered have more tense facial muscles than others who are more relaxed. As the paper explains, this can lead to a certain jaw development and, as a result, a certain facial shape.
Other factors could include the genetic influence of a person’s parents or the way a person wears their hair – one of the facial features that people have the most control over. Incredibly, the people who took part in the study were found to correctly identified names and faces in a culturally appropriate manner. For example, Israeli and French participants were better able to match names and faces within their own cultural group than within each other's cultural group.
We have demonstrated that social constructions do exist – something that has been virtually impossible to test empirically until now. Social structuring is so powerful that it can influence a person’s appearance. It also suggests the extent to which other personality factors that are even more important than names, such as gender or ethnicity, can influence how people grow up, the researchers conclude.
Computer analysis has shown that people with the same name were more likely to have similar expressions around the eyes and mouth – areas of the face that are easier to correct. Image: wamu.org
These results, along with a computer algorithm that also matched faces and names better than chance, support the research team's hypothesis that the face may indeed be a reflection of the name. Or, as the study explains, “we assume that our facial features can change over the years and eventually begin to match expectations of what we should look like.”
This is interesting: How do social media algorithms influence human behavior?
However, not all scientists agree with the findings of their Israeli colleagues. For example,
Katie Mondlock from Canada's Brock University told reporters that she would like to conduct further research to ensure that other factors, such as the unpopularity of other name options, are not at play.
In any case, the findings may make parents think seriously about naming their future child, and the study represents a significant step forward in understanding how social factors shape who we become. Moreover, the work raises interesting questions about identity formation and the long-term influence of social expectations on individual development.