Tech

Computers Can Now Figure Out Your First Name…with Your Face

2017-04-05 , 7:11 pm

Do you look like a regular Tom, Dick or Harry? Has anyone mentioned you look like a Jane or a Jessica? You might have dismissed it as being stereotyping, but it turns out there is some merit behind the idea that you might look like your name.

A recent study in France has discovered that people can consistently identify a person’s first name from a list of 4 at a rate that is higher than pure chance (>25% of the time). Which means, 35% to 40% of the time, people could pick out the correct name when it was expected to be 25% of the time.

In the past, social psychologists have known that our facial features influence others’ perception of our personality. This study has shown that others’ perception of our first names influence how our facial features develop.

Sure, the influence is not really dramatic like some sort of prophecy from the time your parents gave you your name, but it’s there.

Naturally, if it’s something people can do, scientists are going to try to make computers do the same.

When nearly 100,000 ID photos of French people were fed into a computer for analysis, the computer could also guess the correct first name above the rate of pure chance. The computer even churned out a heat map identifying the facial features that make a Charlotte a Charlotte.

See, this is why I stuck a small piece of Blutack onto my laptop’s webcam. If one day I get woken up by my laptop calling me by name, in the middle of the night, I’m so nope-ing the hell out of there.

One possible reason why a name can make a person is that each name comes loaded with a bunch of societal expectations unique in each culture. In which case, since young a child would be treated slightly differently, as though they had certain character traits already, as their names suggested.

This societal pressure to be what was expected of them to be, then influences how the person regards themselves, which can influence how they look.

Now that is a long chain of influencing, all from the name your parents gave you before you could even remember anything. So when you yourself become a parent, better take good care not to name your kid something unfortunate.

Since you’re here, why not check out Goody Feed’s YouTube videos as well? They’re so Singaporean, I bet you’ll like them!

Featured Image: umaibusiness.com

This article was first published on goodyfeed.com

Computers Can Now Figure Out Your First Name…with Your Face

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