Do we look like our spouses and our names? Re-examining the convergence in physical appearance hypothesis with modern computational methods
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- Faces change over our lifetimes. The causes for these changes can be physical, such as age and diet, or mental, such as emotions and personality. The interplay between these physical and mental factors over time influences how our faces change in specific directions. This can lead to surprising, but not unreasonable, phenomenons. However, traditional studies in these subjects have been limited by challenges in data collection and subjective measurement methods. Recent advances in crowdsourcing and artificial intelligence have allowed us to address these challenges and conduct empirical studies with larger samples and in more objective ways. This dissertation presents two works that applied these modern computational methods to re-examine convergence in physical appearance with two factors: spouses and names. The first work asks the question of why we look like our spouses. The widely disseminated convergence in physical appearance hypothesis posits that long-term partners' facial appearances converges with time due to their shared environment, emotional mimicry, and synchronized activities. Although plausible, this hypothesis is incompatible with empirical findings pertaining to a wide range of other traits—such as personality, intelligence, attitudes, values, and well-being—in which partners show initial similarity but do not converge over time. Using two independent methods of estimating their facial similarity, human judgment and a facial recognition algorithm, we show that while spouses' faces tend to be similar at the beginning of marriage, they do not converge over time, bringing facial appearance in line with other personal characteristics. The second work asks whether we look like our names. The correlation between facial appearance and one's name is not controversial. First, both innate facial features and naming conventions vary across socio-demographic groups, defined by factors such as gender, ethnicity, profession, generation, etc. Second, people actively change their facial appearance to conform to social conventions of their socio-demographic group. However, it has been hypothesized that the link between facial appearance and one's name goes beyond socioeconomic and demographic factors, and that a name alone can affect an individual's facial appearance, as individuals conform to social expectations of how a person with a given name should look. Similarly, we used human judgment and a facial recognition algorithm to show that the face-name matching effect exists, but there is no proof that people alter their facial appearance to match pre-conceived notions of what they should look like.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic resource; remote; computer; online resource |
| Extent | 1 online resource. |
| Place | California |
| Place | [Stanford, California] |
| Publisher | [Stanford University] |
| Copyright date | 2020; ©2020 |
| Publication date | 2020; 2020 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Author | Tea-makorn, Pinnaree |
|---|---|
| Degree supervisor | Kosinski, Michal |
| Thesis advisor | Kosinski, Michal |
| Thesis advisor | Dutton, Robert W |
| Thesis advisor | Prabhakar, Balaji, 1967- |
| Degree committee member | Dutton, Robert W |
| Degree committee member | Prabhakar, Balaji, 1967- |
| Associated with | Stanford University, Department of Electrical Engineering |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|---|
| Genre | Text |
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Pinnaree Tea-makorn. |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the Department of Electrical Engineering. |
| Thesis | Thesis Ph.D. Stanford University 2020. |
| Location | electronic resource |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2020 by Pinnaree Tea-makorn
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