HEC associate professor Anne-Laure Sellier and her fellow researchers presented subjects in Israel and France with a photo and asked them to select the name of the person in the picture from a list of four or five options. Though the laws of chance say that subjects would choose correctly 20% to 25% of the time, they actually had a far higher success rate. The research team’s conclusion: We look like our names.

Professor Sellier, defend your research.

Sellier: We weren’t surprised by the results. They were what all five of us—Yonat Zwebner, Ruth Mayo, and Nir Rosenfeld from Hebrew University; Jacob Goldenberg from IDC Herzliya; and myself—expected. But other people had thought it was weird to suggest you could identify someone’s name just by looking at a photograph. So Yonat proposed empirically testing it. We showed subjects a picture of, say, a Scott, and they picked “Scott” from the list of four or five options 25% to 40% of the time, which is significantly more often than they would just by chance. We replicated those results in France and Israel. If you’re a Scott, there’s something about you that betrays it. It’s tattooed across your face.

HBR: What if it’s just that the other names on the list were rarer and less likely? We controlled for that by offering only choices that were as popular as the actual name, based on the frequency of use. We controlled for most things we could think of, including ethnicity, name length, and the socioeconomic background of the subjects and of the people in the photos.

Put a Name to the Face Though you may feel that you’re guessing, research suggests that something about these faces gives you a better-than-random chance of picking the right name. Answers below. George Scott Adam Bruce Alex Tyler Scott James Answers: Top, Scott; bottom, James

Wouldn’t the results regress to chance if you did this 1,000 more times, though? Because our first studies involved human subjects, we couldn’t use hundreds of faces to show the effect. So we turned to machine learning, reasoning that if Charlotte looks like a Charlotte, even a computer should be able to recognize her as one. We taught a computer what a Charlotte looks like by presenting a few Charlottes and what a non-Charlotte looks like by presenting an Amélie, a Claire, and so on. Then we fed the computer nearly 100,000 faces that it had never processed and, for each one, supplied two names—the real name of the person shown and a second possibility. The computer chose the correct name 54% to 64% of the time, which is significantly higher than the 50% chance level.

Whoa. It was critical to get both human studies and this large computer study to convince our scientific reviewers that the effect was there. And since the research was published, the effect has been replicated by other researchers in the United States and by journalists in France.

What exactly is happening here? We know from plenty of research that people are strongly motivated to belong to a tribe and be recognized by it. Consider that in Peru thousands of years ago, some tribes would bind the skulls of their children to give them a specific shape so that an affiliation with the tribe would be immediately recognizable. Our research suggests we’re still motivated to emphasize our affiliations. I want my tribe to identify me as being one of them as fast as possible, so I do things to make that easy for them: How I dress. The shape of my glasses. How I do my hair. Maybe the tattoos I have. We do this in subconscious ways, too. In America people presumably share a stereotype of what a Scott looks like—even though they can’t draw a Scott—and Scotts want to fit that stereotype. The power of nonverbal information is actually nothing new. Humans are complex machines; we barely understand how much processing we’re doing. For example, the way someone enters an interview room and says hello explains a lot of the variance in evaluations of job applicants. Rich information is being processed and interpreted in those seconds. The same is true about the faces we present to our social environment.

Subjects picked the right name of the person in the photo 25% to 40% of the time.

I don’t think I’m doing anything to look like a Scott.

We’ve known for a while that people typically underestimate—or outright deny—how much they conform to society. You probably are doing something but just don’t realize it.

How many attributes combine to make people see that I’m a Scott, and how important is the fact that I’m awfully good-looking?

We don’t have the answer to that. It may be one feature or a combination of several features. We do know that the hair seems important. In one study we cut out people’s faces and asked subjects to determine names just by looking at the hair. And people were able to do that at a higher rate than chance. When we reversed it and kept the faces and cut the hair out, we got the same result.

Computers that had been “trained” chose the right name 54% to 64% of the time.

We all belong to multiple tribes, though. Do I look like an American Scott, a New England Scott, or a writer Scott?

If you ask me, you kind of look like F. Scott Fitzgerald, so you’ve got the writer and American part nailed. Maybe your tribe is American writers named Scott—we’d have to test it to be sure. Note that you may alter your appearance over time to adjust to different tribes. I spent more than a decade in the U.S., and I probably changed my facial appearance to belong there. Plenty of research suggests that we mimic people more than we realize. It’s deeply ingrained and socially reinforced by the interactions we have over our lives. That explains, by the way, why a Scott today doesn’t necessarily look like a Scott from 50 years ago.

I’m still having a hard time believing this is more than a fluke.

We get that reaction a lot. But when we show the results to participants, they often say that they felt as if they were guessing randomly but sometimes felt they were right and couldn’t explain it.

I also find that when I talk to business students about this and replace first names with brands, they really get it. Do Apple users look like Apple users? Or BMW drivers like BMW drivers? Marketers increasingly attempt to create “communities” of consumers around brands.

An image just of someone’s hair improved the chances of picking the right name.

So brands are tribes?

For strong brands, that may well be the case. This is the focus of my current investigation. When I started working on this project, I actually wanted to use brands, not names. In France a woman “marries” a scent long before she marries a person. We choose a perfume when we’re young and typically stick with it. And I wanted to see if you could look at someone and correctly say, “She wears Chanel No. 5” or “She wears Obsession” just on the basis of her facial appearance. The issue with brands, though, is one of reverse causality. You may wear Chanel No. 5 as a result of looking like the stereotypical wearer, while our theory is that the brand causes you to change your look.

You never answered my question about whether excessive attractiveness is part of being a Scott. Seriously, I’m really handsome.

I’d say that seems like such a Scott thing to say, but we haven’t studied that yet.