What’s in a name? Apparently, your face.
In a new study out of Israel’s Reichman University, researchers have found a fascinating correlation between adults’ facial features and their names — but strangely, the same didn’t seem to be true of children’s faces and names, suggesting that your face changes over time to better suit your name.
Published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the study’s deceptively simple design saw researchers asking one group of participants aged 9-10 and another who were adults to pick names to go with the faces of adults and children.
“The findings revealed that both the children and the adults correctly matched adult faces to their corresponding names, significantly above the chance level,” a press release about the research explains. “However, when it came to children’s faces and names, the participants were unable to make accurate associations.”
Later, the researchers — most of whom came from marketing and business backgrounds, interestingly — fed a dataset of adults with similar names and children with similar names into a machine learning algorithm. The algorithm also found that there were similarities among the like-named adults, but none existed with children.
Ultimately, the study suggests that there’s something of a self-fulfilling prophecy at play where one’s facial features change over time to match stereotypes associated with their name — or, explained differently, that social structures are at play even when it comes to something as personal as one’s first name.
“Social structuring is so strong that it can affect a person’s appearance,” explained Reichman University’s Dr. Yonat Zwebner, the paper’s first author, in the school’s press release. “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.”
Compelling as these findings may be, they do, however, fail to take a lot into account — including, perhaps most importantly, that people change their names, gender presentations, and their gender markers over time.
Then again, with gender itself being a social construct, there could be further research that considers it as well.
More on names: Study Finds Fascinating Link Between First Letter of Your First Name and the Trajectory of Your Life
