Do I look like an Edward to you?
You can be honest, since I can’t hear what you’re saying anyway. (Unless you give me a phone call, and I’d really rather you didn’t.)
To me, of course, I do look like an Edward (and also an Ed, and, to those who knew me growing up, first in Texas, then in Weyburn, an Eddie), but I may not to you.
It’s an odd thing, but we associate certain names with certain looks, a fact novelists use all the time: readers will form a different mental image of a hero named Dirk than they will of one named Sylvester. The entertainment biz is well aware of this, which is why John Wayne starred in all those westerns instead of Marion Morrison, and kids go to birthday parties at Chuck E. Cheese’s and not Aloysius P. Quiche’s.
Recently, a scientist decided to look into why this should be so.
Robin Thomas, a cognitive scientist at Miami University in Ohio, noticed that she often confused the names of two students–not something she was prone to with other students. She finally realized it was because, to her, their faces didn’t fit their names.
That personal experience inspired her to find out whether Americans hold common notions of what kinds of faces should go with certain names.
The research team she assembled asked 150 college students (a mixture of men and women) to use computer software similar to that used by police departments to modify a standard set of male facial features into a face they thought fit the name they’d been assigned from a list of 15: Bob, Bill, Mark, Joe, Tim, John, Josh, Rick, Brian, Tom, Matt, Dan, Jason, Andy, and Justin. (What, no Ed?) No eyeglasses or facial hair were included.
A second group of students then approved the drawings, which itself suggested that, indeed, people associate certain facial features with certain names.
In a second experiment, 139 other students were asked to match the drawings and names from the first experiment after they had been separately printed, then shuffled. An impressive 10 times out 15, the students made the correct match.
Finally, in a third experiment, 67 students viewed the names and faces on a computer screen and learned to link the names and faces through a series of quizzes. The researchers found that the students learned which name went with which face much more quickly when they suited each other. For example, students learned which face belonged to “Bob” faster if that name was assigned to a round face, rather than a thin face. “Tim,” on the other hand, was more readily associated with a thinner, more angular face.
Having established scientifically what everyone probably already suspected from their own experience to be true (although, since only white male faces were used, there’s obviously an opportunity for more research along these lines using women’s names and faces and names from various ethnic backgrounds), the next question for the researchers to tackle is, “Why?”
One possibility is that the sounds of names somehow seep through our brains into the areas responsible for face perception. “Bob” is a round-sounding name, while “Tim” is a thin, angular-sounding name, and thus we expect “Bob” to have a round face and “Tim” to have a thinner face.
Something else the researchers would like to look is if these preconceptions regarding names and appearances change the way we view other people. Thomas puts it this way, “If I tell you the fellow you will be meeting this afternoon is named ‘Bob’ will you perceive his face rounder than it actually is? Or if I tell you that his name is ‘Tim,’ will you perceive him to be thinner than he actually is?”
And what happens when our preconceptions are completely upended by reality? How do we react to the Tim-looking Bob, or the Bob-looking Tim? “Think of how bizarre a glass of water tastes if you expect it to be 7-Up instead,” Thomas said.
And, no, I’m not seven feet tall and thin as a pencil.
Why do you ask?
