Between people’s faces and their names discovered the strange relationship

An unusual experiment has shown that a person’s name for some unclear reasons, is associated with the appearance of his face.

This may explain the existence of cultural stereotypes around certain names, according to a paper published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

“In the case of other stereotypes that so often happens – they affect who we become and how we behave. In our case, people believe that guys named Bob will have a more round face than men named Tim. We believe that stereotypes can actually influence the shape of the human face or to change it,” said Yonath, Zwebner (Yonat Zwebner) from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (Israel).

The emergence of global networks and the accumulation of large amounts of data has enabled psychologists to test several stereotypes about the behavior and appearance of people.
For example, recently American scientists have proven that blondes are not really dumber than brunettes, that man is no internal “Gaydar” and that most of the Internet stereotypes about the interests of men and women is fundamentally wrong. They confirmed that people do make mistakes at the crucial moment of psychological reasons.

Zwebner and his colleagues uncovered another interesting pattern of this kind, which is called the “Dorian gray effect” by observing the behavior of several groups of volunteers from Israel and France, held a simple test. Within its framework, the scientists showed volunteers a photograph of a man or woman out under her four names and asked to guess the name of the person in the portrait.

Scholars interested in whether the answers of the French and Israeli volunteers only accidental, or they will be able to “feel” some kind of regularity connecting the names with the face and its size. In the first case, the proportion of correct responses, as noted, Zwebner should not exceed 25% and the second to be well above this figure.

Much to the surprise of psychologists, closer to the truth was the second option – on average, both the Israelis and the French called the correct name in about 40% of cases, and this proportion remained even when the scientists showed the volunteers portraits of people of the same race, ethnicity and a comparable level of income.

What is even more interesting, “a flair for names” only worked when the participants in the experiments were looking at the pictures of his countrymen – after the scientists changed the picture sets in some places, the level of correct answers fell to below random.

According to psychologists, these results “guessing” point to the fact that the correct answer to the participants of the experiments were prompted by the cultural stereotypes about the appearance of carriers of different popular names that exist in Israel, France and all other countries of the world.

This is supported by the fact that scientists have managed to repeat similar results and even surpass the volunteers exactly “trained” artificial intelligence to solve the same task. Analyzing your face shape, hair style and other features of the exterior, the AI system was able to reach the level of 64% correct answers, which is also higher than random choice.

On the other hand, the question arises: why are the faces of the people fit the stereotypes of the media of those or other names? A specific answer to this riddle yet, but Zwebner believes that people unconsciously adapt to the stereotypes about his name, changing the hair, makeup and other facial features, which is easy to change.

paradox