There is a guy I actually once knew–he was a classmate in HS–and is now a moderately well-known orchestra conductor. I spent a year sabbatical at Penn and he gave a talk there a year later. His photo was in the student paper and one of the secretaries thought they had mixed up his photo with mine. They hadn’t. We are both large and bearded. At least one other person also confused us. He really doesn’t look all that much like me. Oh, I didn’t mention that he is black (well, fairly light-skinned black) and I am white (well, fairly dark-skin white). I still have my HS yearbook and we didn’t look at all alike, BTW.
Some guy in an airport once asked me if I was Allen Ginsberg. Except for the beard, I didn’t look at all like Ginsberg. So these things are very subjective.
My wife is always commenting on how two people look alike and I can’t see it. But when I think two people resemble each other, she often can’t see it. We are obviously keying on different features.
I looked exactly like someone in a Normal Rockwell painting - exactly. Several people commented on it back in 1972. Unfortunately, that kid still looks about 14, and I look my age.
That Ed Harris - Ernest Borgnine thing - interesting point. People recognize features, associate with “was in movies” and then try to make the match to satisfy that nagging in the back of their mind. I suspect this is where the false police line-up identification comes from. “I know he must be here, I think he had that funny chin, that must be him.” (Or, “he’s black with a round face and small chin, that must be him.”)
Yes. People are always saying Jeff Bridges looks like me. But I only notice a passing resemblance. I guess people are just trying to say something nice to him.
But seriously, folks… way back when I started working for a living, I was confused by getting halves of conversations at work: “So I talked to my dad like you said I should…”
A friend of mine was getting these, too. We figured out that people thought we were one person. Even though we saw no resemblance. Similar but by no means equal build, coloring, accent. But… we both had Porn Star 'Staches (hey, it was the 70s).
Facial hair will do it. I’ve had a beard most of the time since I was a teenager and that’s usually the way people identify me, and mistake me for anyone else with a beard. It’s as if it’s all people see. You know how in comedies someone puts on a big fake mustache and you think “That won’t fool anyone”? Well apparently it will.
i do this thing where i *visually *associate people who don’t exactly or even remotely look the same. sometimes the associations are so strong it ruins things (i had a crush on someone before realizing she visually reminded me of my ex’s step mom. MASSIVE bonerkill).
now, i’m a card carrying visual artist with a’schoolin’ and everything, so i would like to think i have a firm grasp on aesthetics–but this thing comes up enough that i think about it, yet cannot pinpoint the aspects that draw the association.
all that to ask: we all have our “confused with someone else” or “thought they saw me in a crowd” stories—do other people make odd, non-identical-looks-based associations?
my persona can be distilled to a shaved head, facial hair and glasses. so according to people, i look like everyone from billy corgan to moby to amed zappa to burly bikers to jamie from mythbusters. none of these people look like me or each other, so i suspect it is a similar case of visual association that isn’t based on facial features but instead easily-digested attributes.
When I had hornrimmed glasses, I had a few people tell me I looked “just like” Woody Allen. Always dumb people, though, no-one who said it ever came across as smart.
No one has ever said I look anything like Woody Allen when I wasn’t wearing that particular style of glasses, and in fact I look nothing at all like him. But dumb people apparently see a “feature” like hornrimmed glasses and that’s all they notice.
So, I changed my glasses style again and have never since been compared to Woody Allen.
It certainly is something you can quantify. For example, you get a participant to look at a 3d image of a person* from a distance of 1m for 60 seconds. 10 minutes later, the same participant now has to look at a second 3d image, then say whether they believe the two people are one and the same (let’s say the odds of you using the same person are 50%).
Repeat a few thousand times and you’d get a good idea of how much, on average, two people resemble each other, and what the chance is of you having a perfect doppelganger somewhere (“perfect” in that the chance of people recognizing that person as being you is the same or greater than the chance of them recognizing you as you).
There would be a racial skew to the results; I believe that some studies have shown different populations recognize people in different ways. e.g. Caucasians look at hair and eye colour first and may perceive that East Asians have little variety in appearance. But East Asians might look at face shape first and to them it is Caucasians that look alike.
Anyway, such a skew can be quantified or averaged out.
The 3D image would exclude confounding factors like hair style. And, in the case of the two images being of the same person, they would still be two, separately-produced images.
Actually, I had a pretty full beard. At one point I had to shave it off, I showed up for work the next day and several people commented about my missing beard; except one lady, not the brighted bulb in the elevator, who said “there’s something different about you today…?”
Quite a few people mentioned shaving off (non-pornstar) mustaches only to have people say “what’s different about you today?”
100% I have a doppelganger named Raif, I have never met him but working rock shows I have had dozens of people yell “Hey Raif” most come up to me with the smile you would give an old friend and a few have insisted that I am pulling some kind of prank on them when I explain I am not. He works in production as well, apparently out of So Cal. It is weird.