A person’s name may influence their facial appearance as they age, demonstrating that social factors are so powerful, that they can even alter a person’s physical appearance, according to Israeli researchers. The findings open new avenues for understanding the interaction between social factors and identity formation.
“These results suggest that the congruence between facial appearance and names is not innate, but rather develops as individuals mature,” explained Prof. Mayo. “It appears that people may alter their appearance over time to conform to cultural expectations associated with their name,” said Professor Ruth Mayo of Hebrew University, who led the research.
Mayo’s team conducted a series of experiments involving both human participants and machine learning algorithms to explore the relationship between names and facial features. The findings were recently published in the peer-reviewed Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).
The research showed that adults’ faces can be matched to their names more accurately than chance, whereas this effect is not observed in children’s faces. This suggests that a congruence between a person’s name and their facial appearance develops over time, influenced by social expectations, rather than being an innate characteristic from birth.
The study found that both adults and children were able to match adult faces to their names with accuracy greater than chance levels. This indicates that the connection between names and facial appearance becomes apparent and recognizable in adulthood.
However, neither adults nor children could match children’s faces to their names above chance levels. This suggests that the face-name congruence seen in adults is not present in children, highlighting that it is a developmental phenomenon rather than an inherent trait from birth.
Moreover, machine learning analysis revealed that algorithms found greater similarity in the facial representations of adults sharing the same name compared to those with different names. This finding was not observed among children, further emphasizing that the effect develops over time, the researcher said.
In the final step of the experiment, the images of the children’s faces were artificially aged. These aged images did not exhibit the face-name matching effect seen in actual adult faces, reinforcing the idea that the congruence between names and facial appearance emerges through real-life social and developmental processes.
The researchers said the findings highlight the concept of a “self-fulfilling prophecy,” where social expectations subtly shape physical appearance. This phenomenon underscores the profound impact that social factors have on our development, extending beyond behavior and personality traits to even influence physical features.
The study adds a new dimension to the longstanding debate about the influence of stereotypes and social expectations versus hereditary factors. While the effects of heredity are relatively straightforward to measure, isolating and empirically measuring the impact of the environment has always been challenging, the researchers noted.
Mayo and her team now aim to explore how cultural expectations and stereotypes associated with names can lead to changes in facial appearance over time.
