Where's Waldo...does being of the same race help?
By Joshua Benson
“They all look alike” is one of those statements that we are taught to avoid saying due to the racial undertones that it possesses. While it is certainly important to be sensitive to that, there is a psychological concept that helps explain why many people have a hard time differentiating between individuals from a race other than their own. The concept is known by multiple names such as own-race, other-race, or cross-race with either bias or effect added on to the end of the name. For the purpose of this blog, I will refer to it as the own-race bias. AlleyDog.com defines it as “the tendency to recognize and differentiate between faces of our own race more easily than faces of another race.” The concept isn’t unique to any one race, although we may feel like it is based on cultural influences and the norms regarding race within our individual cultures. It is a result of how our memory may operates when identifying individuals from races other than our own.
There are a number of explanations for own-race bias; this article from Forbes magazine describes some of the reasons. Hair color and style play a major role in differentiating individuals in a predominantly Caucasian society. Eye color will also be a noticeable difference. If you were in a mostly black society, these factors will mean less when trying to tell two people apart. Black people are more likely to notice different skin tone in differentiating between individuals of the same race. It’s important to note that success in cross-race identification tasks do not follow predictions based on racial attitudes. Prejudiced and non-prejudiced people both struggle with these tasks equally.
Check out this video that shows six people of varying races taking a test developed by psychology researchers to see if they have a bias or preference toward African Americans or European Americans. It is interesting to watch the participants’ reactions to their results as well as the insight they share as to why they behaved the way they did. You can also take this test yourself by clicking on this link. Even though my focus is on the “Race IAT,” you may also want to take some of the other tests to see what implicit biases are part of your memory.
Beyond the ever-present situation of racism, there are other implications of why the own-race bias is important to continue to study, specifically concerning the criminal justice system. The criminal justice system has and continues to be an area of concern when eyewitness identification and testimony can be attached to false memories assisted by the own-race bias. To date, the Innocence Project has noted that among the 360 plus wrongful convictions that have been overturned; false identifications played a role in over 70% of those cases. The fact that many people struggle to correctly identify a suspect from a race other than their own plays a significant role in these erroneous convictions.
You may be wondering if we are hardwired to always have this implicit bias or can we overcome it. Many studies have determined the answer is YES. One potential way to overcome implicit bias is by changing the groups we choose to associate with and the experiences we have. If we predominantly surround ourselves with only homogeneous people, we are likely to have a greater own-race bias. We also need to take more of an individual rather than holistic (Herzmann) approach to recognizing the distinguishing features of people from a race other than our own. The more we recognize the specific differences, the more we add to our memory database of different shapes, sizes, and nuances that will allow us to see people as individuals rather than of a particular race. Maybe the next time you encounter a “Where’s Waldo” picture, you will find yourself saying “who cares” due to noticing all of the other very interesting people represented within the picture.
Resources
AlleyDog.com resources retrieved: https://www.alleydog.com/glossary/definition.php?term=Own+Race+Bias
As/Is. (2015, September 15). Do you have a racial bias? [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cykcpqSpVZo&t=213s
Herzmann, G., Minor, G., Curran, T. (2018) Neural evidence for the contribution of holistic processing but not attention allocation to the other-race effect on face memory. Cognitive, Affective, and Behavioral Neuroscience, 18 (5).
Innocence Project resources retrieved: https://www.innocenceproject.org/eyewitness-identification-reform/
Pomeroy, S. R. (2014, January 28). ‘They All Look Alike’: The Other-Race Effect. Forbes.
Project Implicit resources retrieved: https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/takeatest.html
Psynso resources retrieved: https://psynso.com/implicit-association-test/
Shaw, J. (2016). The Memory Illusion: Remembering, Forgetting, and the Science of False Memory, Random House Books, London. (p. 152-154)