Your Name Has A Strange Effect On Your Face, Study Finds
NDTV
The researchers concluded that given names at birth are "social tags" that can affect a person's appearance through a self-fulfilling prophecy.
A new study has found that people tend to alter their appearance to suit their names. For the study, published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers asked 9-to-10-year-old children and adults to match faces with names. They found that both age groups showed a notable ability to successfully pair adult faces with their correct names, performing significantly better than random chance. However, when it came to matching names with children's faces, the accuracy of their associations dropped considerably, the study revealed.
"We have demonstrated that social constructs, or structuring, do exist - something that until now has been almost impossible to test empirically," explained Yonat Zwebner, the study author and a marketing expert from the Reichman University in Israel.
"Social structuring is so strong that it can affect a person's appearance. These findings may imply the extent to which other personal factors that are even more significant than names, such as gender or ethnicity, may shape who people grow up to be," Mr Zwebner said.
