Thirty Years of Investigating the Own-Race Bias in Memory for Faces: A Meta-Analytic Review

The Meissner and Brigham (2001) meta-analysis provided an excellent review of the past thirty years of research involving the cross-race effect. This paper reviews issues concerning the reliability of the effect, examines possible explanations of the cross-race effect, and also looks at possible moderators. I like that all of these factors are given attention in this article because it is important to examine all of these factors with regard to the cross-race effect.
I found it very interesting that the authors discussed issues related to interracial contact, which did account for about 2% of the variance involving the cross-race effect. They also examined a possible cohort effect and found that there was a cohort effect possibly because of greater contact between groups. From our class discussion, it seems like contact does come up a lot when people discuss the cross-race effect. It is certainly brought up a lot in court because the prosecutor may try to claim that the witness had previous contact with another race, so the witness is not susceptible to the cross-race effect. I think it is important to be cautious concerning claims such as these because it is relatively easy to subjectively state that a person is good at recognizing other-race faces, but actually testing this claim may not result in the same finding. A person may be good at recognizing other-race faces from interracial contact, but in court cases, it is important to be very cautious. I think it is also possible that a critical period could exist for people in recognizing other-race faces.
The authors of this paper also strongly advocate for the use of eyewitness experts to testify about the cross-race effect. This position is somewhat different than that advocated by Wells and Olson (2001) because they recommended that different procedures should be used with regard to lineups and not necessarily relying solely on eyewitness experts. I think it is important to try to handle the cross-race effect in any possible way, but if it can be somewhat controlled at the outset in a lineup, then that may be more beneficial for everyone.

HC