Cross-race effect

[2] A number of theories as to why the cross-race effect exists have been conceived, including social cognition and perceptual expertise.

[5] Research using computational models have found that the other race effect only occurs when facial processing and feature selection is influenced by biased experience.

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.

[3] Another set of cognitive theories related to cross-race effect focuses on how social categorization and individuation biases face memory.

[9] They find that the likelihood of falsely identifying a member of an out-group stems from an automatic encoding of a face without processing its unique features.

[3] Regarding the mixed evidence, the popular belief is that the more someone is exposed to people of different races the less likely they will be affected by the cross-race effect.

[3] There is some evidence showing when the cross-race effect first emerges, but there is little research directly testing the onset of ingroup and outgroup recognition biases in young children.

[14] Challenges to the perceptual expertise models are the mixed evidence for the interracial contact hypothesis, and the varied results of the training effect.

Similarly, faces of an ambiguous but equal shade are interpreted as darker or lighter when accompanied by the label of either "black" or "white", respectively.

A study has shown that social perception of wealth has the ability to modulate the effect: when the targets were seen as impoverished, the difference in facial recognition disappeared.

[9] From their studies, researchers have concluded that when an individual belonging to an ethnicity that differs from his or her own, he or she forms a prototype and reserves it for future use, if and when necessary.

[9] The prototype view raises concern, however, because individuals storing these unique faces may ignore the fact that everyone has features that may be only special to his or her makeup, and may not apply to everyone belonging to that particular ethnic group or race; thus, this results in more false alarms during eyewitness testimony or identifying perpetrators in lineups.

[9] Deeper study of the cross-race effect has demonstrated two types of processing for the recognition of faces: featural and holistic.

[19] Some eye tracking studies found tentative evidence for such a hypothesis by demonstrating that people look at different facial features in same- versus other-race faces.

[26] The reasoning is that this causes more nodes to become activated in reaction to an other-race face, resulting in faster classification, but less discriminability in terms of memory.

However, these exemplar-based theories cannot explain why faces that are ambiguous in terms of social category information can influence recognition.

[27][28] These initial fixations are highly similar across ethnicities/cultures of the face/observer, suggesting that critical traits such as familiarity, identity, and sex/gender are computed with a common eye movement and perceptual encoding strategy shared across humans, with culture/ethnicity-specific differences only emerging later on in the scan path.

[29] One method researchers have suggested to help mollify the prevalence of the cross race effect is through application of the contact hypothesis.

Accurate recognition and identification of other-race faces, researchers have deduced, stems from a difference in learning experiences that relate to individual ethnic groups.

[30] The type of contact experienced between the two ethnic groups also plays a major role in this hypothesis' effectiveness; the more intimate the contact, the higher the chances become of accurately recognizing a member of a different ethnicity than one's own[30] As an example, research done on Asian and white students living in Singapore and Canada showed a significant cross race effect that was not able to be predicted by perceived familiarity with the other race.

This has been established empirically,[35] wherein a large set of 3D scans of faces from different ethnic backgrounds was automatically clustered into groups.

[38] In a study dealing with eyewitness testimony, investigators examined forty participants in a racially diverse area of the US.

Participants watched a video of a property crime being committed, then in the next 24 hours came to pick the suspect out of a photo line-up.

[42] Psychological experts all agree that the cross-race effect is a common occurrence during in-court testimony when an eyewitness is trying to remember a person.

[45] For example, to reduce the cross-race identification bias Britain has a law that states police must include the suspect in a line up with at least eight other people who share similar characteristics to him or her.

[46] Research has shown, that when making financial decisions, specific facial characteristics and implicit bias can influence the perceived trustworthiness of another person.

[48] Research has also found that individuation training in which other race faces are given specific characteristics can mitigate the cross-race effect.

[49] In a study done on 43 white men, administering oxytocin before participants memorized faces was also found to reduce the cross-race effect.

Figure 2 from "A Memory Computational Basis for the Other-Race Effect" (Yaros et al., 2019) that show evidence of the other race effect occurring when participants do a Mnemonic discrimination task but not a match to sample task, showing that mnemonic and proactive interference (old memories interfere with new) may contribute to the other-race effect (cross-race effect) [ 11 ]
grid with 20 faces, center column shows the original face (first two faces in column are white, last two faces are Asian) without editing. The leftmost face has the distance between eyes or between nose and mouth 10 pixels smaller than the original (the middle face), the face located second from the left has the distance between eyes or between nose and mouth 5 pixels smaller than the original, the rightmost face has the distance between eyes or between nose and mouth 10 pixels larger than the original, and the face located second from the right has the distance between eyes or between nose and mouth 5 pixels larger than the original.
Sample of real and edited white and Asian faces used in study of the Cross-race effect [ 18 ]
Ronald Cotton (left) and Jennifer Thomson-Cannino (right) sitting in two rolling office chairs in front of large red and blue Pop!Tech logo.
Ronald Cotton with Jennifer Thompson-Cannino at PopTech 2010. After Thompson-Cannino mistakenly identified Cotton as her rapist, Cotton was convicted of rape in 1985. A decade later, DNA evidence exonerated him. The case is often used as a real world example of the cross-race effect and the potential dangers of eyewitness testimony and lineup identification.