‘He looks like a Bob’: Study shows people good at matching names to faces

Ever heard anyone say things like “You look like a Michelle” or “With a square jaw like that, he must be a Brandon”?

If you have, you may be wondering: can people actually “look like” their names?

The answer might be “yes” according to new research, published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, that finds that people are surprisingly good at matching names to faces of complete strangers.

This may be because people subconsciously alter their appearance to conform to cultural stereotypes of their name, the study’s authors say.

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For the study, researchers at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem conducted a series of experiments in which participants were given photos of people and asked to select the name that best corresponded to the face of the person in the photo.

Turns out they were accurate 35 to 40 per cent of the time — even when factors like age, ethnicity and socio-economic status were controlled for.

What’s more, Israeli participants were better at matching Hebrew names and Israeli faces, while French participants were better at matching French names and faces, suggesting a culture-specific effect.

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The researchers even tested their hypothesis on a computer, creating a special algorithm to train the machine to match names to faces. After plowing through 94,000 photos, the computer boasted an accuracy rate between 54 and 64 per cent, which is significantly better than random chance (50 per cent).

Lead researcher Yonat Zwebner stopped short of suggesting that all Catherines grow up to be brunettes and all Larrys end up wearing glasses, but pointed out that “sometimes the stereotypical expectations of others affect who we become.”

“Prior research has shown there are cultural stereotypes attached to names, including how someone should look,” Zwebner said in a press release.

“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 people’s facial appearance.”

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This theory was backed up by the findings of one experiment which showed that areas of the face that can be controlled, such as hairstyle, were enough to produce the effect.

“Together, these findings suggest that facial appearance represents social expectations of how a person with a particular name should look. In this way, a social tag may influence one’s facial appearance,” said co-author Ruth Mayo.

“We are subject to social structuring from the minute we are born, not only by gender, ethnicity and socioeconomic status, but by the simple choice others make in giving us our name.”