There must be times when you have just met a person who introduced herself as “Susan,” and you think to yourself: “Ha! I knew she was ‘Susan!’” You might think that this feeling of being right is illusory. But in fact, you might not be blind-guessing – at least you were not surprised by her name. Let’s take another example. Look at the man’s face below – most people may feel surprised if his name turns out to be “Bob,” but are less surprised if he is “Andy” or “Timothy.”
This “stereotype” is not complete nonsense. A study in 2017 invited people from 3 different countries, Israel, the US, and France, to guess the names of unfamiliar faces out of several possible options. People selected the correct name (the actual name of the person providing face pictures) more often than other incorrect options, and this trend is significant and common among all three countries.
Face-name effect
This is not the first time researchers observed real associations between people’s names and their appearance. Ten years before this study, researchers at Miami University found a name-face association effect: participants saw pictures of faces and their names, and they were asked to remember the names of these faces. When the faces did not look like the names they were paired with, participants were less likely to remember the names. For example, when the man with a round face is called Tim and the man with a narrow face and long hair is called Bob, students are less likely to remember their names correctly.
We still don’t know if these studies point to a true correlation between names and physical appearance. The study from 2007 only argued that people believe certain faces should have certain appearances. Do real Bobs have rounder faces? If a person has a round face, are they more likely to be named Bob? There are a lot of possible directions regarding which is the cause, and which is the effect. Years later, the 2017 study probed this question one step further, focusing on two aspects.
First, they verified the association between facial features and name stereotypes in real life, that is, do people really look like their names? As mentioned at the beginning of this article, people are likely to guess the name correctly in real life just by looking at their faces. To verify how reliable this conclusion was, the researchers replicated this experiment in two different cultures. Furthermore, just to eliminate human bias as much as possible, the researchers trained a computer to match names with faces using a machine learning algorithm. The program learned from real examples of face-name pairs and was tested with new faces that were never fed to the program. Again, the accuracy of the machine’s guess is above chance, meaning it didn’t just randomly guess.
All signs suggest there is really a solid association between appearance and given name. Why is that? The second area of focus the researchers looked into was if there were several possible reasons for this association. Where does this association come from? There are 2 possible directions: either a person’s appearance influenced the choice of the name or a person’s appearance is influenced by their own name through time, or maybe in both ways.
Hypothesis 1: Appearance decides the name
No matter how hard it is to believe, parents’ expectations of their children already started to differ in terms of “what kind of person my children will turn out to be” when their children were still infants, and the differences in expectations turned into differences in the children. Previous research found different patterns when responding to different children within the same family that were related to parents’ perceptions of their children. For example, parents might respond to a calm infant with less anxiety. It is possible that if a boy was born with a big and round face, the boy is more likely named “Bob.” The researchers mentioned some common associations between names and appearances, which is similar to what people call “synesthesia.” For example, most people would agree that the pronunciation of “Bob” feels round, and that’s a possible reason why the name was associated with the round face appearance. A lot of slim letters or flat and sharp pronunciations in a name might make it a skinny impression of the person.
However, the researchers of the 2017 study pointed out the limitations of this explanation. First of all, it is often the case that given names were decided before birth. Also, studies have shown that in the first period after birth, babies’ look quite similar to each other, compared to the great diversity when they become adults. Considering these reasons, naming after the appearance of a baby might not be the main reason why people look like their names.
Hypothesis 2: Self-Fulfilling Prophecy
Social psychologists discovered a common tendency that people tend to become what other people and themselves expect or believe them to become. For example, in 1968, a group of researchers offered a test that they claimed would be able to tell the potential of a student. They randomly selected a portion of the cohort in several American elementary schools and told their teachers that these students were very talented. After a period of time, the researchers found that these students were really making greater progress than their counterparts in their cohorts; the only difference was whether their teachers believed they were particularly talented or not.
Similarly, researchers tried to test whether the features of people’s names have a similar effect on their appearance. For example, if a person named Linda observed external expectations based on stereotypes of the name “Linda,” will Linda (either consciously or unconsciously) modify her behavior to fit into this expectation? Will she gradually change as a result of different responses when she looks like or unlike a “Linda?”
The researchers tried to test this hypothesis by analyzing the hairstyle of the people they collected face pictures from. The idea is simple: if people tend to fit into the expectations of being like their names, then easily changeable features, such as their hairstyle, would be a strong contributor to their name-face association. For example, if this is true, Bob’s hairstyle alone (without his face) would already look like a Bob. It turned out to be exactly the case: participants of this study either saw people’s whole faces with hair, saw the inner face region alone (no hair), or just saw the hairstyle (no face). In whichever condition, participants are still able to guess the name of the person better than a random shot.
This result confirmed the self-fulfilling prophecy idea. It is possible that when a person chooses an appearance that matches their name, people (or themselves) will “look/feel more like them.” At least, according to the earlier study, people remember who they are more easily.
Are you a person with a given name that matches your face quite well? Can you recall some past stories in your life when people tend to believe you should look in certain ways? Do you think that might shape the way you dress yourself right now? This may not be a bad thing anyway – after so many years’ company, the name might already be part of your identity. If you still don’t like it – as researchers mentioned – you can just change it!
Edited by Brianna Best and Chloe Holden
Children tend to look like their parents (or one of them), so it is
still possible that a name is chosen so that it will likely match what
the child is expected to look like when they grow up. A bulky
round-faced father would expect his son to look like him, and thus
chooses the name Bob rather than Timothy.
To me Bob is a more universal name, as it could be short for Roberto, or Robierre. Although Tim is a name of Greek origin, I tend to find most people called Tim, that I come across, are Anglo. Many people called Tim, that I come across tend to look like the drawing of the blonde guy. In fact the only people called Tim, I have met, are either blonde or ginger. I have never met a brunette Tim, nor have I met a Tim who isn’t white. To me, Tim is an upper class preppy name. I would expect a Tim to be a Protestant, and somewhat uptight.
I would expect a Bob to be more laid back, and much jollier. I have met people called Bob who are Italian, Jewish, Afro American, French, Irish, Anglo, and Pacific Islander. Bob is not a stuffy name, unlike Tim. A Tim is likely to wear a polo shirt with chinos, and have a “fashy hairstyle, whereas a Bob is likely to wear a ball cap, a hoodie or a baseball jacket, and sweatpants with sneakers. His hair would be scruffy. Leonard Hofstadter looks like a Bob. Neil Patrick Harris, in How I met your mother, looks like a Tim.