Other-race Effect Research Articles

Individuating and categorizing faces: The other-race effect is reduced by attending to racial but not identity cues

ABSTRACT According to social-cognitive accounts, the other-race effect in face recognition is driven by our tendency to attend to identity cues when encoding own-race faces (“individuation”) and racial cues when encoding other-race faces (“categorization”). This study employed novel one-back tasks to ensure that participants processed identity (individuation) or racial cues (categorization) when learning faces in an old/new recognition task. Categorization encoding eliminated the other-race effect in recognition sensitivity when list length was short (Experiment 2) but not when list length was long (Experiment 1B). Importantly, this elimination was driven by weaker performance for own-race faces, rather than stronger performance for other-race faces. Individuation encoding failed to reduce the other-race effect, regardless of list length (Experiment 1A and Experiment 2). We compare these findings with previous studies and propose several methodological features (e.g., presentation duration, task difficulty) that might influence the observed impacts of individuation and categorization encoding on the other-race effect.

Spotting missing or wanted people: racial biases in prospective person memory

Searching for missing or wanted people is a crucial task in our society. Previous work on prospective person memory (PPM) has demonstrated that performance on this type of search task is worse relative to standard prospective memory tasks. Importantly, this process may be further affected by the race of the missing person, yet this has never been tested in laboratory settings. To test the effects of race on PPM, a convenience sample consisting primarily of self-identified Caucasian participants was asked to search for either a Caucasian or an Indian target person while judging the orientation of different Caucasian and Indian faces. Although the tasks were otherwise identical, 89% of Caucasian PPM targets were found while only 53% of Indian targets were found. Furthermore, relative to a control group with no PPM requirements, participants were slower and more error-prone when judging Indian faces relative to White faces, particularly if they were searching for an Indian face. We interpret these results as revealing other-race effects in prospective person memory, highlighting race as a critical factor for finding missing people. Importantly, this also emphasizes the need for real-world search efforts to factor in difficulty differences when people monitor for missing/wanted people from their own or different racial backgrounds. For example, media coverage of missing persons cases could perhaps be distributed more equitably by considering whether the missing person is from a racial minority in that region.

Different features for different races: Tracking the eyes of Asian, Black, and White participants viewing Asian, Black, and White Faces.

The own-race bias (ORB) is an effect in which humans remember faces from their own race better than faces from another race. Where people look when processing faces of different races plays a role in this effect, but the exact relationship between looking and the ORB is debated. One perspective is that the same facial features are important for memory for faces of all races and the ORB emerges when people look longer at the useful features for own- than other-race faces. Another perspective is that different facial features are useful for faces of different races and the ORB emerges when people look longer at features that are useful for their own race than at features that are useful for other-race faces. The present study aimed to discriminate these perspectives by examining looking patterns in Asian, Black, and White participants while they learned and later recognized Asian, Black, and White faces. Regardless of their race, participants looked at different facial features depending on the race of the face. In addition, different features were useful for memory depending on the race of the face. As such, results are in line with the perspective that different facial features are useful for different race faces.

Visualizing the Other-Race Effect with GAN-based Image Reconstruction

Visualizing the Other-Race Effect with GAN-based Image Reconstruction

The effect of face race on metamemory: Examining its robustness and underlying mechanisms.

Perceivers typically exhibit better recognition memory for same-race faces than for cross-race faces, a phenomenon known as the cross-race effect (CRE). Despite its ubiquity, it is yet unclear whether people are metacognitively aware of the CRE. This research thoroughly investigates perceivers' metacognitive awareness of the CRE across five experiments. Experiments 1 and 2 demonstrated that both prospective (judgments of learning) and retrospective (confidence) metamemory judgments are sensitive to variations in the racial category and prototypicality of faces. Experiment 3 showed that participants' item-level prospective judgments are informed by beliefs about the impact of face race on memory performance. Experiment 4 revealed that global predictions are influenced by face race in the absence of direct stimulus experience, emphasizing the role of preexisting beliefs. Experiment 5 extended these findings by showing large crossover interactions between face race and participant race in both global predictions and item-level prospective judgments, indicating that both White and Black participants have higher metamemory estimates for ingroup faces. This experiment further showed that preexisting beliefs intensify the impact of face race on metamemory judgments yet do not fully account for it. Collectively, these experiments provide robust evidence of good metamemory accuracy for faces varying in racial categories and prototypicality among White participants and demonstrate that beliefs underlie the effect of face race on metamemory judgments among both White and Black participants, though this may not be the only mechanism involved. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Prospective person memory and own-race bias of missing person appeals

Prospective person memory and own-race bias of missing person appeals

No evidence for an other-race effect in dominance and trustworthy judgements from faces.

A variety of evidence shows that social categorization of people based on their race can lead to stereotypical judgements and prejudicial behaviour. Here, we explore the extent to which trait judgements of faces are influenced by race. To address this issue, we measured the reliability of first impressions for own-race and other-race faces in Asian and White participants. Participants viewed pairs of faces and were asked to indicate which of the two faces was more dominant or which of the two faces was more trustworthy. We measured the consistency (or reliability) of these judgements across participants for own-race and other-races faces. We found that judgements of dominance or trustworthiness showed similar levels of reliability for own-race and other-race faces. Moreover, an item analysis showed that the judgements on individual trials were very similar across participants from different races. Next, participants made overall ratings of dominance and trustworthiness from own-race and other-race faces. Again, we found that there was no evidence for an ORE. Together, these results provide a new approach to measuring trait judgements of faces and show that in these conditions there is no ORE for the perception of dominance and trustworthiness.

The other-ethnicity effect in facial recognition of Tibetan and Han individuals: Evidence from behavioural and eye-movement data.

Studies have shown that facial recognition among racial groups exhibits not only an other-race effect but also an other-ethnicity effect within the same racial group. To explore differences in facial recognition and visual scanning patterns due to the other-ethnicity effect, behavioural and eye-movement data were used to investigate the other-ethnicity effect in the facial perception of Tibetan and Han Chinese individuals and whether the visual scanning patterns varied between them. Behavioural data revealed an other-ethnicity effect on facial recognition of Tibetan and Han individuals. Eye-movement data indicated that Tibetan and Han individuals fixated more on the eye and mouth regions when recognising Han faces and on the eye and nose regions when recognising Tibetan faces. The other-ethnicity effect appeared to influence facial recognition in Tibetan and Han individuals, who adopted similar visual scanning patterns when scanning the faces of individuals of their own ethnicity and those of other ethnicities.

Towards a two-factor approach to the cross-race effect

Towards a two-factor approach to the cross-race effect

Social identity threat attenuates own-race bias in face recognition under the “Asian-Caucasian” context

People typically remember faces of their own race better than the faces of other races, which is known as the own-race bias. Social-cognitive theories on the own-race bias debate if motivation plays a role in racial face recognition under the “Asian-Caucasian” context. We investigated the effect of social-identity-threat based motivation on own-race bias. In Experiment 1, Chinese participants were primed with a negative image of own-race by associating Chinese (i.e., own-race) faces with negative personality traits. Results showed that such social identity threat marginally affect the own-race bias in face recognition sensitivity (Experiment 1a), and it did not influence participants' implicit positive attitudes toward their ethnicity (Experiment 1b). In Experiments 2, 3 and 4, the social identity threat was manipulated by reading an article before the face recognition task. Experiment 2 found that the social identity threat significantly affected the own-race bias in face recognition false alarm. Although we did not find the modulation effect of group on ORB with ANOVA in Experiments 3 and 4, we observed the significant indirect effect of group on ORB through the mediator of generalized threat. Together, the current study provides evidence of social motivation in the own-race bias in the “Asian-Caucasian” setting.

Closing a conceptual gap in race perception research: A functional integration of the other-race face recognition and "who said what?" paradigms.

White people confuse Black faces more than their own-race faces. This is an example of the other-race effect, commonly measured by the other-race face recognition task. Like this task, the "Who said what?" paradigm uses within-race confusions in memory, but to measure social categorization strength. The former finds a strongly asymmetrical pattern of interrace perception, the other-race effect, yet the latter usually finds symmetrical patterns (equally strong categorization of own-race and other-race faces). In a "Who said what?" meta-analysis, racial categorization and individuation across races were only weakly asymmetrical (Study 1, n = 2,669). We aimed to resolve this empirical misalignment. As tested in other-race face recognition tasks, the weak asymmetry was not due to the limited number of portrait stimuli (Study 2, N = 99) nor to the longer duration of stimulus presentation in the "Who said what?" task (Study 4, n = 358). Pairing portraits with statements reduced the other-race effect (Study 3, n = 126). Showing each portrait repeatedly also reduced the other-race effect (Study 4, n = 358; Study 5, n = 470) but did not decrease infrahumanization of Black portraits (Study 6, n = 487). Consequently, presenting portraits only once in the "Who said what?" paradigm (Study 7, N = 112) resulted in strong interrace categorization and individuation asymmetries. This finding bridges a central conceptual gap between the other-race effect and social categorization strength. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

The cross-race effect is mitigated by own-gender bias but not minimal groups or university affiliation

ABSTRACT Two experiments tested whether the cross-race effect (CRE) was mitigated more effectively by the own-gender effect (OGE) than minimal group manipulations. In experiment one, White participants were randomly assigned to one of two colour teams. They studied 16 faces (divided as follows: Black female, White female, Black male, and White male) half which were visually identified as team members. Face gender, via the OGE, but not colour teams mitigated the CRE in female participants such that White male faces were more accurately recognized than Black male faces, while White and Black female faces were recognized equally well. Experiment two replicated experiment one and tested whether university affiliation was a promising CRE mitigator. Again, only face gender mitigated the CRE in female participants. These results suggest that at least in White female participants the CRE may be more effectively mitigated by the OGE compared to commonly used minimal group manipulations.

The other-race effect of pupil contagion in infancy

Pupil contagion refers to the observer’s pupil-diameter changes in response to changes in the pupil diameter of others. Recent studies on the other-race effect on pupil contagion have mainly focused on using eye region images as stimuli, revealing the effect in adults but not in infants. To address this research gap, the current study used whole-face images as stimuli to assess the pupil-diameter response of 5–6-month-old and 7–8-month-old infants to changes in the pupil-diameter of both upright and inverted unfamiliar-race faces. The study initially hypothesized that there would be no pupil contagion in either upright or inverted unfamiliar-race faces, based on our previous finding of pupil contagion occurring only in familiar-race faces among 5–6-month-old infants. Notably, the current results indicated that 5–6-month-old infants exhibited pupil contagion in both upright and inverted unfamiliar-race faces, while 7–8-month-old infants showed this effect only in upright unfamiliar-race faces. These results demonstrate that the face inversion effect of pupil contagion does not occur in 5–6-month-old infants, thereby suggesting the presence of the other-race effect in pupil contagion among this age group. Overall, this study provides the first evidence of the other-race effect on infants’ pupil contagion using face stimuli.

How is race perceived during adolescence? A meta-analysis of the own-race bias.

Adolescence is a critical developmental period that is marked by drastic changes in face recognition, which are reflected in patterns of bias (i.e., superior recognition for some individuals compared to others). Here, we evaluate how race is perceived during face recognition and whether adolescents exhibit an own-race bias (ORB). We conducted a Bayesian meta-analysis to estimate the summary effect size of the ORB across 16 unique studies (38 effect sizes) with 1,321 adolescent participants between the ages of ∼10-22 years of age. This meta-analytic approach allowed us to inform the analysis with prior findings from the adult literature and evaluate how well they fit the adolescent literature. We report a positive, small ORB (Hedges's g = 0.24) that was evident under increasing levels of uncertainty in the analysis. The magnitude of the ORB was not systematically impacted by participant age or race, which is inconsistent with predictions from perceptual expertise and social cognitive theories. Critically, our findings are limited in generalizability by the study samples, which largely include White adolescents in White-dominant countries. Future longitudinal studies that include racially diverse samples and measure social context, perceiver motivation, peer reorientation, social network composition, and ethnic-racial identity development are critical for understanding the presence, magnitude, and relative flexibility of the ORB in adolescence. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Actors' facial similarity and its impact on US movies' box-office performance in East and South-East Asia

PurposeAnecdotal evidence suggests that casting actors with similar facial features in a movie can pose challenges in foreign markets, hindering the audience's ability to recognize and remember characters. Extending developments in the literature on the cross-race effect, we hypothesize that facial similarity – the extent to which the actors starring in a movie share similar facial features – will reduce the country-level box-office performance of US movies in East and South-East Asia (ESEA) countries.Design/methodology/approachWe assembled data from various secondary data sources on US non-animation movies (2012–2021) and their releases in ESEA countries. Combining the data resulted in a cross-section of 2,616 movie-country observations.FindingsActors' facial similarity in a US movie's cast reduces its box-office performance in ESEA countries. This effect is weakened as immigration in the country, internet penetration in the country and star power increase and strengthened as cast size increases.Originality/valueThis first study on the effects of cast's facial similarity on box-office performance represents a novel extension to the growing literature on the antecedents of movies' box-office performance by being at the intersection of the two literature streams on (1) the box-office effects of cast characteristics and (2) the antecedents, in general, of box-office performance in the ESEA region.

Do They Look the Same Unless They Are Angry? Investigating the Other-Race Effect in the Presence of Angry Expressions

Ethnic out-group members are disproportionately more often the victim of misidentifications. The so-called other-race effect (ORE), the tendency to better remember faces of individuals belonging to one’s own ethnic in-group than faces belonging to an ethnic out-group, has been identified as one causal ingredient in such tragic incidents. Investigating an important aspect for the ORE—that is, emotional expression—the seminal study by Ackerman and colleagues (2006) found that White participants remembered neutral White faces better than neutral Black faces, but crucially, Black angry faces were better remembered than White angry faces (i.e., a reversed ORE). In the current study, we sought to replicate this study and directly tackle the potential causes for different results with later work. Three hundred ninety-six adult White U.S. citizens completed our study in which we manipulated the kind of employed stimuli (as in the original study vs. more standardized ones) whether participants knew of the recognition task already at the encoding phase. Additionally, participants were asked about the unusualness of the presented faces. We were able to replicate results from the Ackerman et al. (2006) study with the original stimuli but not with more standardized stimuli.

Biracial Faces Offer Visual Cues of Successful Intergroup Contact: Genetic Admixture and Coalition Detection.

This research explores how biracial facial cues affect racial perception and social judgment. We tested a coalition-signaling hypothesis of biracial cues in two studies conducted in the United States (n = 227) and China (n = 116). From the perspective of intergroup and interpersonal relations theories in social psychology, biracial features would likely be perceived as cues of threat or resource competition. In contrast, we propose an evolutionary hypothesis that biracial facial cues reveal the ancestral history of intergroup alliances between members of two races or ethnic groups. When racial cues are mixed, we predict that biracial individuals may be viewed more positively than other-race or even own-race members who often compete for limited ingroup resources. The participants observed facial images that ranged from 100% Asian to 100% Caucasian, including morphed biracial composites of 30%, 40%, 50%, 60%, and 70% Caucasian or Asian. The participants evaluated each image regarding perceived Caucasianness (Asianness), attractiveness, trustworthiness, health, intelligence, and career prospects. The US and Chinese samples yielded a similar pattern of own-race bias in racial perception and biracial favoritism in social judgment. The social judgment ratings were not correlated with the racial perception scores and were independent of the sex of the participants or biracial images, indicating a coalitional motive, instead of a mating motive, underlying social perception of biracial individuals. Overall, the results suggest that biracial facial features signal a successful genetic admixture and coalition in parental generations and thus increase the trustworthiness and cooperative potential of a biracial person.

The Influence of the Other-Race Effect on Susceptibility to Face Morphing Attacks.

Facial morphs created between two identities resemble both of the faces used to create the morph. Consequently, humans and machines are prone to mistake morphs made from two identities for either of the faces used to create the morph. This vulnerability has been exploited in "morph attacks" in security scenarios. Here, we asked whether the "other-race effect" (ORE)-the human advantage for identifying own- vs. other-race faces-exacerbates morph attack susceptibility for humans. We also asked whether face-identification performance in a deep convolutional neural network (DCNN) is affected by the race of morphed faces. Caucasian (CA) and East-Asian (EA) participants performed a face-identity matching task on pairs of CA and EA face images in two conditions. In the morph condition, different-identity pairs consisted of an image of identity "A" and a 50/50 morph between images of identity "A" and "B". In the baseline condition, morphs of different identities never appeared. As expected, morphs were identified mistakenly more often than original face images. Of primary interest, morph identification was substantially worse for cross-race faces than for own-race faces. Similar to humans, the DCNN performed more accurately for original face images than for morphed image pairs. Notably, the deep network proved substantially more accurate than humans in both cases. The results point to the possibility that DCNNs might be useful for improving face identification accuracy when morphed faces are presented. They also indicate the significance of the race of a face in morph attack susceptibility in applied settings.

The cross-race effect in automatic facial expression recognition violates measurement invariance.

Emotion has been a subject undergoing intensive research in psychology and cognitive neuroscience over several decades. Recently, more and more studies of emotion have adopted automatic rather than manual methods of facial emotion recognition to analyze images or videos of human faces. Compared to manual methods, these computer-vision-based, automatic methods can help objectively and rapidly analyze a large amount of data. These automatic methods have also been validated and believed to be accurate in their judgments. However, these automatic methods often rely on statistical learning models (e.g., deep neural networks), which are intrinsically inductive and thus suffer from problems of induction. Specifically, the models that were trained primarily on Western faces may not generalize well to accurately judge Eastern faces, which can then jeopardize the measurement invariance of emotions in cross-cultural studies. To demonstrate such a possibility, the present study carries out a cross-racial validation of two popular facial emotion recognition systems-FaceReader and DeepFace-using two Western and two Eastern face datasets. Although both systems could achieve overall high accuracies in the judgments of emotion category on the Western datasets, they performed relatively poorly on the Eastern datasets, especially in recognition of negative emotions. While these results caution the use of these automatic methods of emotion recognition on non-Western faces, the results also suggest that the measurements of happiness outputted by these automatic methods are accurate and invariant across races and hence can still be utilized for cross-cultural studies of positive psychology.

Contributions of Ethnicity and Attention to the Ensemble Emotional Perception in a Mixed Group

Abstract The other-race effect (ORE) is the phenomenon by which own-race faces are better recognized than other-race faces, which is one of the best-replicated phenomena in facial recognition. However, it is still unknown whether this effect also exists in the emotional perception of group faces. In this study, we tried to clarify whether the ORE exists in a mixed group of Asian and Caucasian faces and whether this possible ORE is driven by attention modulation. Results suggested that the ORE did exist in the emotional process of a mixed group. Moreover, attention could modulate this emotional significance by increasing the weight of the different face (the different face represents the face whose ethnicity is different from the other 3), especially when the different face is of the participants’ own ethnicity (Asian). However, Asian participants tended to discard the single Caucasian face but depended on the 3 Asian faces to form the ensemble representation of them regardless of attention to the Caucasian face. Therefore, for Asian participants, although there is an ORE for the emotional ensemble representation of faces from different ethnicities, this effect is not entirely driven by attentional modulation. Together with the error distribution analysis, results suggested that ORE is more likely to be affected by perceptual precision. These findings may help us better understand the emotional perception of faces from different ethnicities.