Our Names May Affect How We Look as Adults
Have you ever looked at someone and thought, "That guy looks like a Steve"?
It's not just you — research has found that people's faces may actually indicate what their names are!
But are names chosen to match people's faces when they're born? Or do our faces change to match our names?
Researchers in Israel wanted to find out.
The researchers asked about 300 adults and nearly 250 children to look at pictures of children's and adults' faces. Both children and adults were included because children are better at recognizing children's faces, while adults are better at recognizing adults' faces.
The participants were shown photos and asked to choose one of four names — like Natalie, Jasmine, Dana or May for a woman's face, for example.
Both adults and children could match an adult's picture to the correct name more than one time in four — meaning their odds of getting the right name were better than pure chance.
But their results were worse than chance when matching children's photos with their names.
A computer analysis also found that the faces of adults with the same name were similar, but the faces of children with the same name were not.
And when the researchers digitally aged photos of children to make them look like adults, adults looking at the photos couldn't choose the right name any better than random chance.
Even the computer couldn't find similarities between artificially aged faces of children with the same name.
The researchers think this shows that adults with the same name don't look similar because of biology, but because they experience similar social expectations.
The people around us have expectations of what a "Steve" should be like. And over time, someone named Steve will, consciously or unconsciously, start to behave — and even look — more like other Steves!
