Cross-race effect

The cross-race effect (sometimes called cross-race bias, other-race bias or own-race bias) is the tendency to more easily recognize faces of the race that one is most familiar with (which is most often one's own race). A study was made which examined 271 real court cases. In photographic line-ups, 231 witnesses participated in cross-race versus same-race identification. In cross-race lineups, only 45% were correctly identified versus 60% for same-race identifications.

In social psychology, the cross-race effect is described as the "ingroup advantage". In other fields, the effect can be seen as a specific form of the "ingroup advantage" since it is only applied in interracial or inter-ethnic situations, whereas "ingroup advantage" can refer to mono-ethnic situations as well.

Deeper study of the cross-race effect has also demonstrated two types of processing for the recognition of faces: featural and holistic. It has been found that holistic processing (which occurs beyond individual parts of the face) is more commonly used in same-race situations, but there is an experience effect, which means that as a person gains more experience with those of a particular race, he or she will begin to use more holistic processing. Featural processing is much more commonly used with an unfamiliar stimulus or face.

The first research on the cross-race effect was published in 1914. It stated that humans tend to perceive people of other races than themselves to all look alike. All else being equal, individuals of a given race are distinguishable from each other in proportion to their familiarity or contact with the race as a whole. Thus, to the uninitiated Caucasian, all East Asian people look alike, while to East Asian people, all Caucasian people look alike. This does not hold true when people of different races familiarize themselves with races different from their own.

Cross-race effect has a strong connection with the ingroup advantage phenomenon. With ingroup advantage, people evaluate and judge members of their own self-defined group as being better and fairer than members of other groups (outgroup disadvantage). Social psychologists have demonstrated in the last 30 years that even the smallest aspect of differentiation, like preference for flavor of ice cream or style of music, can trigger ingroup advantage. If the group-building factor is a person's race, then cross-race effect appears. The favoritism of ingroup members also results from the decreased inborn motivation to read the face of a person of another group or culture. Hess, Senecal & Kirouac showed in 1996 that the motivation to decode the emotional facial expression instantly decreased when the experimental subject realized that the face belonged to a person of another race.

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