People can guess your name just by looking at your face

People can guess yur personenname just by looking at your facePeople can guess your name just by looking at your faceIts not uncommon to have a hunch about someones name based on their facial features. As it turns out, theres scientific evidence to back up this idea, according to researchin the Journal of Personality and Social Psychologypublished online in February 2017.It all boils down to the face-name matching effect, a way in which, the researchers say, both a social perceiver and a computer are able to accurately match a persons name to his or her face. They found that participants were able to do sosignificantly above chance level and thatcultural associations (stereotypes) about names play a role, and this may be partially because what people thought about the names wasreportedly specific to a participants background.In case you think its just menschenfreundlich bias robots think we look alike too. The researchers found that computer that had been taught to match names to fac es with a learning algorithm, when presented more thana whopping 94,000 pictures of faces, succeeded the majority of the time, nailing between 54% and 64% of its guesses.Who participated in the studyThe researchers carried outeight studies total- six where hundreds of French and Israeli participants matched names to faces (done in varying formats, with each study having different numbers of people) and featuring computer that had been taught a algorithm.But no matter who was participating in the study- human or machine- the participants were shown pictures of faces of people they didnt know, each one accompanied by different names one of which was the persons actual one.What the researchers foundOf all of the findings, here are a few that stood out.As the press release points out, during each study, human participants did better picking the right names (25-40% correct) than doing so randomly (20-25% correct), even when ethnicity, age and other socioeconomic variables were control led for. It also states that when a computer participated during a study, it was 54-64% accurate, compared to50% accurate when doing so randomly, and that the results were culture-specific when humans participated.Study 5 also helped illustrate that people did better than choosing at random. Participants were shown a picture of a man with the choices Jacob, Josef, Nathaniel and Dan. Spoiler his name was Dan- they picked this name 38% of the time compared to the 25% chance level of a random guess.But it works both ways- peoples names sometimes impact their faces,which they hypothesize issomewhat of aDorian Gray Effect, citing prior research.The study found that the face-name match implies that people live up to their given name in their physical identity. The possibility that our name can influence our look, even to a small extent, is intriguing, suggesting the important role of social structuring in general and naming in particular in the complex interaction between the self and s ociety. We are subject to social structuring from the minute we are born, not only by our gender, ethnicity, and socioeconomic status, but also by the simple choice that others make in giving us our name.Lead author Yonat Zwebner, a PhD candidate at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem when the research was carried out, commented on the findings in a statement, showing that stereotypes can play a role.We are familiar with such a process from other stereotypes, like ethnicity and gender where sometimes the stereotypical expectations of others affect who we becomePrior research has shown there are cultural stereotypes attached to names, including how someone should look. For instance, people are more likely to imagine a person named Bob to have a rounder face than a person named Tim. We believe these stereotypes can, over time, affect peoples facial appearance, Zwebner said.We sometimes attribute certain names to people based on cultural stereotypes, but its also possible for our names to impact how we present ourselves.