I was within a hare’s breath of being named after a certain Saint that loved making crosses out of weeds.
At the last minute, my parents decided to go for a kinder moniker that meant I didn’t grow up with the name of a middle-aged nurse from rural Monaghan. (no offence intended)
Now, according to some fresh research published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, we are able to guess which names suit certain faces.
It is also culture-bound: French participants had the most success with French faces and Irish with Irish faces etc.
Interestingly, cross-cultural guesses were pretty awful – The French apparently hadn’t a clue what a ‘Clíodhna’ would look like.
It is quite reassuring to be told you look like your name – like a divine security about your rightful existence.
But the freakiest part was when it came to the machine learning – Artificial intelligence was given algorithms and other data and was able to pinpoint most of the names right.
This is basically the way robots behind Facebook can understand what’s in photos.
Lead author, Yonat Zwebner and his colleagues examined over a hundred thousand photos in a database.
58,000 images for 13 male names and 36,000 facial images for 15 female names. The algorithm was then asked to match one of two names to a given face and did better than chance with every name.
See, freaky.
Researchers have now been scratching their heads about why faces and names run in parallel but believe it could be a self-fulfilling prophecy:
“Our given name is our very first social tagging. Each name has associated characteristics, behaviours, and a look, and as such, it has a meaning and a shared schema within a society. These name stereotypes include a prototypical facial appearance such that we have a shared representation for the ‘right’ look associated with each name. Over time, a Joy will gain smile lines, a Luther will grow stern.”
And amazingly, they believe that a name can influence your life-actions:
“Stereotypical expectations of how we should look may eventually manifest in our facial appearance”
Just wow.
Now I’m off to rename my husband, James Bond.
