A new study has found that people tend to alter their appearance to suit their names. The researchers sought to determine whether parents choose a baby name based on what seems fitting for the baby's appearance, or if individuals' facial appearances change over the years to align with the social stereotypes associated with their names.
The findings here seem like a real stretch.
Saying that people can “Accurately” identify names for adults but not children feels tenuous when the correct answer was given basically slightly less than 25% for children and slightly more than 25% for adults, for four answers. That’s barely better than random chance.
If there is a correlation between name and appearance, then as other people have said, this is likely due to factors of age, and popularity of different names at different times. The child group used children only from a narrow range of 9-12 whereas the adult group was broader, so it is would be easier to see the influence of age this in the adult group.
I assumed those conducting the study would be very familiar with that bias and try to eliminate it by only using names that were equally popular at the same time as the person’s actual age for each question, but I couldn’t find that information.
If we assume they DID try to eliminate generational popularity as a factor, there are still more plausible explanations IMO.
For example, different names are going to be popular among different socioeconomic backgrounds - wealth, education, political leaning, geographic location of the parents will all affect name choice!
So if there is any correlation at all, my personal conclusion would not be that the name determines who people grow up to be, but that someone’s physical appearance is influenced by their socioeconomic background, and that name also correlates with that background.
So name is simply a predictor for what background someone grew up with, nothing more!
Thanks for summarizing the research. Immediately after hearing the study I was wondering if there might be an element around name popularity by age groups (assuming they even did a good job with name randomization).