People change their looks depending on their name, study finds

People “live up to their name” by adapting their physical appearance to fit public perceptions of how they should look, researchers suggested today.

They found that participants in a study had a better-than-chance ability to match a person’s name to their face — probably due to cultural stereotypes attached to first names.

This is because people may be subconsciously altering their appearance, including their hairstyle, to conform to “norms and cues” associated with their name, they believe.

Other factors include the sound of the name — with the “rounder sound” of a name such as Bob being linked to those with a “rounder face” — the literal meaning of the name, or its association with a famous person.

Others may infer a person with a certain name has a particular social status as they mentally determine what is the “right name” for a specific face.

In one test, respondents correctly guessed that a man was called Dan and not Jacob, Josef or Nathaniel. In another, respondents repeatedly beat the odds to correctly identify people named Aurelie, Barbara and Pierre.

Lead researcher Yonat Zwebner said: “We are familiar with such a process from other stereotypes, like ethnicity and gender where 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. 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.”

The situation where internal factors such as personality influence external facial appearance has been dubbed the Dorian Gray effect, after the Oscar Wilde character who sells his soul to stay young while his portrait ages. The researchers say: “We propose that one’s given name may have a Dorian Gray effect on one’s face. Our given name is our very first social tagging.”

The study, carried out in Israel and France and published by the American Psychological Association, asked participants to view photos and choose a name from four or five options.

In every experiment, the participants were significantly better — 25 to 40 per cent accurate — at matching the name to the face than random chance — 20 or 25 per cent accurate, depending on the experiment — even when ethnicity, age and other socioeconomic variables were taken into account.

Report co-author Ruth Mayo said: “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. 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.”