patrick.net

This study investigates the possibility of a self-fulfilling prophecy effect wherein individuals’ facial appearance develops over time to resemble the social stereotypes associated with given names. Leveraging the face–name matching effect, which demonstrates an ability to match adults’ names to their faces, we hypothesized that individuals would resemble their social stereotype (name) in adulthood but not in childhood. ...

For images of adults, we observed a similarity lift of 60.05%. This means that for 60.05% of the facial image test-set triplets (anchor face, same-name face, different-name face), the similarity between faces with the same name exceeded the similarity between faces with different names. This percentage was significantly higher than the random-chance level of 50%, indicating a meaningful association between names and facial appearance in adults. In contrast, for children, the similarity lift was only 51.88%, which was not significantly different from the random-chance level of 50%, demonstrating no meaningful association between facial appearance and names for children.