Instapundit links to a study reported by ScienceAlert which finds that as they mature, people come to look like their given names. I'm not kidding, here's the study.
When a photograph of an adult was shown to participants with four possible name choices, they chose the correct name at a rate well above chance. When child faces were shown, however, the study's participants weren't nearly as good at matching faces to names.
In the past, studies have found evidence that a person's facial appearance is suggestive of their given name. But it wasn't clear if that was because people were given names to match their innate facial features as babies, or if their appearance developed over time to better suit their birth name.
The current study tests this nature or nurture debate using human participants and machine learning algorithms. It was conducted by researchers at the Reichmann University and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Israel.
Since the study only worked for adult photos, it is fair to conclude that the name given an infant will over time cause the adult some 2-4 decades later to have made choices which cause them to look like a person with that name. Who knew?
