Adults' facial appearances tend to align with their given names over time due to social expectations and stereotypes.

“The ‘fulfillment’ of the ‘prophecy’ entailed in one’s given name and manifested in facial appearance casts a new light on the social influence of a stereotype,” noted study investigators. “We are social creatures who are affected by nurture: One of our most unique and individual physical components, our facial appearance, can be shaped by a social factor, our name.”

Researchers investigated the “self-fulfilling prophecy” of a name by human assessment, machine learning, and digital aging.

In the first paradigm, adult and child participants were asked to match faces to names. Adults correctly matched at a rate of 30.4% (p < 0.001) for adult faces, which was significantly above chance (25%). However, for children’s faces, the matching accuracy was 23.61% (p = 0.308), not significantly different from chance, according to study results published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The second paradigm involved a Triplet Loss Siamese Neural Network to assess facial similarity among individuals with the same name. The network showed that adults with the same name had more similar facial representations, with a similarity lift of 60.05%, which was significantly higher than the random-chance level of 50% (d = 0.62, 95% CI [0.06, 0.14]). In contrast, the similarity lift for children was only 51.88%, not significantly different from chance (p = 0.348, d = 0.14, 95% CI [0.02, 0.06]). This finding supported the hypothesis that face-name congruence develops over time through social processes rather than being an innate characteristic.

The third paradigm tested the face-name matching effect using digitally aged children’s faces. Researchers employed generative adversarial networks to simulate how children's faces might appear as adults. Participants could not accurately match these artificially aged faces to their names beyond chance level, with a similarity lift of 51.41% (p = 0.66, d = 0.06, 95% CI [0.05, 0.08]). This result further supported the idea that the congruence between facial appearance and names is due to social developmental processes rather than innate characteristics, noted researchers.

The authors reported no competing interests.