Can we guess someone’s NAME just by looking at his or her FACE?

Facial appearance has influence when we judge people: it impacts how a man or a woman is observed by others, regarding critical characteristics such as attractiveness, intelligence, charisma, kindness, and authority.

Our parents usually pick our names before or right after our birth. In each case, the choice of our name has little in common with our facial appearance at birth since baby faces look much more alike when compared with grown-up faces.

Numerous studies have examined the face-name matching possibility - the capacity of a perceiver (human or AI) to guess the name of a person according to his or her facial appearance alone. For example, Psychologists Zwebner, Sellier, Rosenfeld, Goldenberg, and Mayo recently measured how well people can match the true name to a face through several studies in two different countries. In addition, they also tested if an AI algorithm can find a connection between names and faces, for which they used more than 94,000 different headshots.

They presented the perceiver (either human participants or an AI) with a series of unknown headshots. For each headshot, the perceiver was given several names to pick from, among which the depicted person’s true name was included. The tests showed that the real name can be guessed significantly above the chance level of an accidental guess.

For example, after looking at the picture above, almost 40% perceivers chose the true name “Dan”, which is notably above the 25% chance level. These findings indicate that a person’s name can be revealed by his or her facial appearance.

From a social angle, identifying a well-known face involves connecting that face to previously stored identity knowledge about the observed person, which also includes his or her name. Thus, when a human perceiver matches a name to a face, he or she uses personal, social, and historical information associated with the names he or she is given as options. This is why the human perceivers achieved much better guesses than the AI.

Therefore, these experiments suggest that facial appearance does to a certain degree depend on social expectations of how a person with a specific name should look like. The chance that our name can impact our look is intriguing and it seems that, due to the expectations imposed on us by the society, we do live up to our given names in our physical appearance. This is a prime example of how comprehensive and complex the interactions between our personality and the society we live in can be.

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Image sources: 1, 2, 3.