Can names shape facial appearance?

Abstract

Our given name is a social tag associated with us early in life. This study investigates the possibility of a self-fulfilling prophecy effect wherein individuals' facial appearance develops over time to resemble the social stereotypes associated with given names. Leveraging the face-name matching effect, which demonstrates an ability to match adults' names to their faces, we hypothesized that individuals would resemble their social stereotype (name) in adulthood but not in childhood. To test this hypothesis, children and adults were asked to match faces and names of children and adults. Results revealed that both adults and children correctly matched adult faces to their corresponding names, significantly above the chance level. However, when it came to children's faces and names, participants were unable to make accurate associations. Complementing our lab studies, we employed a machine-learning framework to process facial image data and found that facial representations of adults with the same name were more similar to each other than to those of adults with different names. This pattern of similarity was absent among the facial representations of children, thereby strengthening the case for the self-fulfilling prophecy hypothesis. Furthermore, the face-name matching effect was evident for adults but not for children's faces that were artificially aged to resemble adults, supporting the conjectured role of social development in this effect. 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.

Keywords: facial appearance; self-fulfilling prophecy; stereotypes.

Fig. 1.

Example of trials in Study 2. (A) is an example from the adult target set (left). (B) is an example from the child target set (right). This is a loose translation into English.

Fig. 2.

Results from Study 1 show the mean accuracy ratings for matching the true name to its face, for adult and child targets by adult and child participants. The dashed line indicates chance level. Error bars represent the 95% CI for the mean.

Fig. 3.

Results from Study 2 showing mean accuracy ratings for matching the true name to its face, for adult and child targets by adult and child participants. The dashed line indicates chance level. Error bars represent the 95% CI for the mean.

Fig. 4.

Visualization of feature space in a Siamese Neural Network for facial similarity.

Fig. 5.

Results from Study 3. The mean similarity lift for adults is significantly higher than the chance level as well as significantly higher than the similarity lift for children. The dashed line indicates chance level. Error bars represent the 95% confidence intervals for the mean.

Fig. 6.

Results from Study 4A show the mean accuracy ratings for adult participants matching the true name to its face, for natural adults’ images and those that were digitally matured. The dashed line indicates chance level. Error bars represent the 95% CI for the mean.

Fig. 7.

Results from Study 4B. The mean similarity lift for artificially aged adults is not significantly higher than the chance level and is compared to the results for the children and natural adults from Study 3. The dashed line indicates chance level. Error bars represent the 95% CI for the mean.