Your name could shape your face, new study suggests

Long before anyone knows what we'll really look like, we're given the label we will probably carry for the rest of our lives - our name. But what if your appearance, particularly your face, somehow reflected the name you were given at birth?

A new study suggests that each person's face, insanely enough, could actually be shaped by his or her name.

So that would mean, yes, that Sarah really does look like a Sarah, and that Fred really does look like a Fred. Basically, the new findings could finally give some credence to all those weird, usually seemingly baseless assumptions you might have the first time you hear a new name, as NPR reports.

"We Look Like Our Names: The Manifestation of Name Stereotypes in Facial Appearance" is the name of the the psychology experiment led by researchers at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem and published Monday in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

Researchers found that when a person was shown a stranger's face, they picked the right name out of five choices about 35 per cent of the time. And aside from picking the right name over a third of the time, the study's participants continued to keep matching up faces with the right names through a series of other experiments with varying conditions, according to lead author, Yonat Zwebner.

"We ran more than a dozen studies, and each time we had this feeling like, 'Oh boy, maybe this time it won't work,'" Zwebner, a social psychologist at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, told NPR. "And each time, it worked. That was really surprising."

Drawing those connections led the study's researchers to believe there is a real tie between your name and what you look like.

[embed]https://twitter.com/HebrewU/status/836259522956120075[/embed]

Read the full article here.

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