An unusual experiment showed that the name of a person, for some unknown reason, is associated with the appearance of his face. This may explain the existence of cultural stereotypes around certain names, according to an article published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
“This is often the case with other stereotypes - they affect who we become and how we behave. In our case, people think that guys named Bob will have rounder faces than men named Tim. We believe that stereotypes can indeed influence or change a person's face,”said Yonat Zwebner of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel.
The emergence of the global network and the accumulation of a large amount of data allowed psychologists to test several stereotypes about the behavior and appearance of people.
For example, recently American scientists have shown that blondes are actually no more stupid than brunettes, that a person lacks an internal "gay radar" and that most Internet stereotypes about the interests of men and women are fundamentally wrong. At the same time, they confirmed that people are really more likely to make mistakes at the most crucial moment for psychological reasons.
Zwebner and his colleagues discovered another interesting pattern of this kind, which they called the "Dorian Gray effect", observing the behavior of several groups of volunteers from Israel and France, who took a simple test. Within its framework, scientists showed volunteers a photograph of a man or woman, deduced four names under it and asked them to guess the name of the person in the portrait.
Scientists were interested in whether the answers of the French and Israeli volunteers would be exclusively random, or whether they would be able to "grope" some kind of regularity connecting the names with the face and its size. In the first case, the share of correct answers, as noted by Zwebner, should not exceed 25%, and in the second, it should be significantly higher than this indicator.
Much to the surprise of psychologists, the second option turned out to be closer to the truth - on average, both the Israelis and the French called the correct name in about 40% of cases, and this proportion persisted even when scientists showed volunteers portraits of people of the same race, ethnicity and comparable income level.
Even more interesting, the "instinct for names" only worked when the participants in the experiments looked at the photographs of their compatriots - after the scientists swapped the sets of pictures in places, the level of correct answers dropped to below random.
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According to psychologists, such results of the “guessing game” speak in favor of the fact that the correct answer to the participants of the experiments was prompted by those cultural stereotypes about the appearance of carriers of various popular names that exist in Israel, France and in all other countries of the world.
This is also supported by the fact that scientists were able to repeat similar results and even surpass the volunteers in accuracy by "training" artificial intelligence to solve the same problem. By analyzing the shape of the face, the type of hairstyle and other features of the appearance, the AI system was able to reach the bar of 64% of correct answers, which is also higher than the level of random choice of the answer.
On the other hand, the question arises: why do people's faces correspond to stereotypes about the bearers of certain names? There is no definite answer to this riddle yet, but Zwebner believes that people unconsciously adjust to stereotypes about their name, changing their hairstyle, makeup and other facial features that are easy for a person to change.
