Did someone ever tell you that your face matches your name? Or perhaps it happened the other way around: you meet a new person and you immediately tell yourself “He looks like a Matt” or “She looks like a Becky”. You might have even been right once they shared their names with you. What is this sorcery?

It’s tempting to think that such episodes are the products of chance and personal biases. While the mind can definitely play its tricks on us, you might be surprised to learn that there might truly be something fishy happening here.

According to a new study, adults tend to look like their names more often than one might expect from random chance. Strikingly, this was not the case for children, hinting that our faces may grow to resemble our names as we age.

Names, Faces, and Self-Fulfilling Prophecies

The concept is rooted in the idea of self-fulfilling prophecies — where expectations about a person can influence how they behave, and perhaps even how they look. Researchers in marketing at Reichman University claim that if society holds certain expectations about how someone named “John” or “Emma” should appear, individuals might subconsciously adjust their appearance to fit those expectations over time. This could be through direct choices, like hairstyle or makeup, or indirectly, through life experiences that leave their mark on a face.

It’s not really a crazy idea if you think of gender stereotypes. A lot of men and women behave in stereotypical ways because they’ve been conditioned from early in life. They have internalized certain stereotypically male/female traits and adopted them as adults.

To explore this theory, the research team, led by Yonat Zwebner, conducted a series of five studies. They combined human perception tests with machine learning techniques. The goal was to see if people could match names to faces more accurately than chance would allow.

A Curious Study with Intriguing Results

In the first two studies, both adult and child participants were asked to match names to faces from photographs. Each participant was shown a series of unfamiliar portraits and had to choose from four possible names, only one of which was correct. Remarkably, adults were able to match names to adult faces more accurately than by random chance.

However, the same was not true for children’s faces. This discrepancy suggests that the alignment between a person’s name and their appearance develops over time.

The third study took a more technological approach. The researchers used a type of artificial intelligence known as a Siamese Neural Network to analyze facial similarities. The dataset included 607 adult faces and 557 child faces, with each group featuring the same 20 names (8 male and 12 female names). The AI confirmed the findings from the earlier studies: adults who shared the same name had more similar facial features than those with different names. However, this trend was not observed in children.

To further test their hypothesis, the researchers used Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) to digitally age photographs of children, creating “artificial adults.” When these digitally aged faces were tested against real adult faces, participants struggled to match names with the aged faces, suggesting that the observed name-face congruence might not simply be a product of age but rather a complex interaction between social expectations and personal development.

A Product of Society

But how exactly could someone shape their own facial features to match a name? The researchers suggest that this could happen through conscious and unconscious choices. Hairstyles, glasses, and even facial expressions can subtly alter over time to conform to societal expectations tied to a name. For instance, repeated smiling due to societal expectations could lead to more pronounced wrinkles.

“We already know from previous research that names have stereotypes,” Zwebner told PsyPost. “For example, prior published studies show that in the U.S., you will evaluate a person named ‘Katherine’ as more successful than a person named ‘Bonnie.’ You will also evaluate a person named ‘Scott’ as more popular than ‘Herman.’ Moreover, we know from prior research that people imagine a ‘Bob’ to have a rounder face compared to a ‘Tim.’ All these are name stereotypes that also entail how we think someone with a specific name should look.”

“Therefore, like other stereotypes, one may indeed become more and more like his/her name expectations, including appearance. This is strongly supported by the fact that our participants chose names according to hairstyle alone. It suggests that people embrace a certain hairstyle, and probably more facial features that fit the expectations of how they should look according to their names. Assuming that within a society all share a similar stereotype for Katherine, then we interact with her in a way that matches our shared stereotype. We treat her with specific expectations. As a result, Katherine becomes more and more like a Katherine is expected to be, resulting with a specific matching look. It could also be a more direct association, if the name stereotype is related to a specific look (e.g., wears a ponytail)—then the person could embrace that look.”

More Considerations

Despite these intriguing findings, the research is not without limitations. The study primarily focused on participants from specific cultural backgrounds, which might limit the generalizability of the results. Names and their associated expectations vary widely across cultures, and what holds true in one cultural context may not in another.

There is also the question of timing: at what age do people start to “grow into” their names? The researchers note this as an area ripe for further investigation. Essentially, a deeper understanding of when this alignment begins could offer new insights into developmental processes.

The idea that our names might influence our appearance seems almost whimsical at first. But it opens up intriguing avenues for further research. Could it be that a name not only shapes our identity but also subtly sculpts our features? And if so, what might this mean for how we think about names — and the power they hold — going forward?

The findings appeared in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.