science

The findings here seem like a real stretch.

Saying that people can "Accurately" identify names for adults but not children feels tenuous when they only answered correctly less than 25% of the time for children and slightly more than 25% for adults, among four options. That's barely better than random chance.

If there really even is any 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 would be easier to see the influence of age 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!

Ugh I read this article a few days ago but it doesn't tell you the names of the two pictured. Is her name Dana or not!? Is he Noam??

Can confirm, my name is Richard and I'm shaving my head to look more like Dick.

So a Karen will subconsciously try to be a blonde white woman with an asymmetric neck-long hair bob?

I'm gonna guess this is generational.

Maybe it's an American study. Maybe Americans were more traditional 30-50 years ago than they are now.

40 years ago, maybe Americans of German origins would call their child Arnold or Frank, after their great grandparents or some jazz.

Today, they might go for Noah or Liam, because they're popular and they think it sounds nice. Social media etc might play a role.

It could also be other factors, like people from a specific region of the country having name A instead of name B combined with other traits, or if the age span of the adults is wider than of the children making it possible to capture time trends in popular names.

If that's the case, genetics are further removed from naming when these kids were born than when the adults were. In which case the findings make sense, completely without the self fulfilling prophesy part.

At least personally, of all the things that affect who I am as an adult, I'm pretty sure my name is pretty fucking low on the list.

If anyone's interested, a study from 2017 suggested this and they were kind enough to give us an answer:

Answer: https://pastebin.com/ZuwpBJde (I have no idea how to do spoilers)

How the heck do they know what people with their names look like?

I mean, sure they will meet some people who share their name, but, unless you have a very very common name you mostly will meet people with other names. And wouldn't your fashion be determined by your in group and social and work culture? Same with your hair, isn't that a trend most people follow? Aka 'Oh undercuts are in, everyone is having them... they look quite nice, I should get one'

or 'Oh mullets are ugly...' but everyone named Karl is sporting one?

I guess the Talking Heads were on to something. https://youtu.be/PH5JvU19_YQ?si=gqbkXoBWCngdkCpV

"He would see faces in movies, in TV, in magazines, and in books..."

Seems like it'd be a lot easier to do that the other way around. Then again there are probably a lot of forms to fill out