What does a Sébastien or a Lisa look like? Yes, this is a real question that researchers have tried to answer. Surprise: our first names end up sculpting our faces, and there is indeed a scientific explanation for this phenomenon.
Have you ever been told that you have the head of your first name? Have you ever managed to guess the first name of someone you just met? Have you ever tried, sitting on the terrace of a café, to find the first name of passers-by you meet by chance? Well, it seems that these name-face associations aren’t just a figment of our imagination. Indeed, science has proven that we really do resemble our first name.
In 2017, researchers from HEC Paris and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem showed, through a study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, that the association between a face and a first name is not pure chance. By presenting more than 94,000 photos of strangers to participants, with a choice of four first names for each person, the result of life-size “who is this” is obvious: on average, 40% of respondents found the correct answer, a rate higher than chance (which would be around 25%). For certain first names, the success rate has even gone up to 80%! Whether we like it or not, we all have an idea of what a Vincent, an Audrey or even a Caroline looks like. And often, this stereotype is the same for everyone: it is due to the social label that we unconsciously assign to a first name.
“Imagine a person called Claire, we tend to imagine her with a certain attribute…. Indeed, we believe that these stereotypes can, over time, affect people’s appearance”explains Yonat Zwebner, co-author of the study. Certain areas of the face can in fact be controlled by the individual, such as hairstyle. We will tend to visualize a Clotilde with short or tied hair, for example. So, we could even distinguish two twins and guess which one has which name, just by looking at their hair. Thus, cultural stereotypes around first names can lead to real changes in facial appearance: we end up looking like the image that others have of us. A baby will therefore not necessarily reflect its first name, but an adult will.
“In France, we share a stereotype of the first name Véronique, and the Véroniques evolve their face towards this stereotype, which only the French then know how to recognize”analyzes the study, which was conducted on both French and Israeli participants. Result: the French were better at assigning a French first name to a face rather than an Israeli first name, and vice versa. “All these results suggest that physical appearance is a reflection of a person’s first name and the social expectations that this first name induces. We do not have the same representation of a person named Eléonore as of another young woman named Doria. We are subject to social structuring from birth, not only by gender, ethnicity and socio-economic status, but also by the simple choice our parents made in giving us this or that first name.”explains in turn Ruth Mayo, also co-author of the report.
Of course, very rare first names, or conversely very popular, are more difficult to associate with a physical appearance. The clichés are less precise when a first name is not very common: who can say what a man named Cassien looks like? And the same goes for particularly well-known first names. For example, we know so many Marys, from all generations, that it is difficult to give them a specific face. But there is no doubt that, much more than a simple label, our first name partly shapes our social identity and in a certain way, our future.
