Why Do "They All Look Alike"?

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In my Cognitive Psychology textbook, Cognition: Theory and Applications by Reed, there's a box that talks about why we have trouble distinguishing faces of people who are a different race from us.

People are notoriously awful at recognizing faces from other races. It's a human foible often explained by the notion that we have more experience looking at members of our own race and thus acquire "perceptual expertise" for characteristics of our own kind.
One influential version of that hypothesis argues that the so-called cross-race recognition deficit can be modeled by assuming that faces of other races are more psychologically similar than are faces of one's own race. But Daniel Level, PhD, a cognitive psychologist at Kent State University, has been unsatisfied with that argument.
"The perceptual expertise position is pretty intuitive, and it makes sense," he says. "But I'm arguing that it's not really the case. The problem is not that we can't code the details of cross-race faces - it's that we don't."
Instead, he says, people place inordinate emphasis on race categories - whether someone is white, black, or Asian - ignoring information that would help them recognize people as individuals. In recent research, Levin has shown that people can, in fact, perceive fine differences among faces of people from other races - as long as they're using those differences to make race classifications.
For example, Levin explains, "When a white person looks at another white person's nose, they're likely to think to themselves, 'That's John's nose.' When they look at a black person's nose, they're likely to think, "That's a black nose."
The results are important, Levin maintains, because they help explain the long-standing question of why people are poor at recognizing the faces of people who  belong to other racial groups. Such an understanding could be useful in a variety of settings, including training police and others in the justice system to identify faces more accurately.

Source: From "Why do 'they all look alike'?" by Siri Carpenter, Monitor on Psychology, December, 2000, p. 44.

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3 Comments

This seems to be a perfect example of “top-down” visual processing. Our textbook talks about how two different kinds of visual processing; bottom-up, and top-down. Bottom-up or “data-driven” processing involves a type of synthesis where we take lots of basic information, with no assumptions, and build up from there. Specifically regarding visual input only the most basic sensory information is used to build up from there.

Top-down processing on the other hand involves a type of chunking together of information previously learned or experienced. In the above example Dr. Levin explains that when you see your friends face you are likely to think “That’s John’s nose” but when you see an African american’s nose you are like to think “That’s a black nose.”

This shows how your formulation is of the aggregate of visual stimuli. If we were always using bottom-up processing I’d imagine that we would not see a cross-race effect of this kind. Instead we would always process everything about the person, that is, all visual stimuli perceived from the person from the bare essentials up, and would recognize all the subtle differences amongst members of other races.

I imagine that this was an evolutionary advantage at one point, it's important to mark friend from foe immediately. And members of a different race are visually different, and are thus categorized immediately as "Not someone we know." The rest can be processed in more detail as soon as I get up this cliff face, or up this tree, etc.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/10/081028103109.htm

This article, "A Face By Any Other Name: Seeing Racial Bias" seeks to do different types of research on the our-race bias. A new study is based off a concepts like if Barack Obama would go by his mom's surname and his nickname from childhood, because he would then go by "Barry Dunham". Would he then be seen by America as a quite different president? This article suggests that he probably would.
Because of the negative bias of seeing races different from ours as all looking the same this can cause problems. Espeically problems in the legal system when it comes to identifying criminals. Eyeswitnesses may have a harder time identifying a person in a line up if they are of a different race. The study of seeing what the effect of a name has on a person of another race is being studyied to help to understand the mechanisms that drive these bias in ourselves.

I've always been interested in why it is more difficult for cross race identification. In a way it makes sense, people are typically self-centered, whether they know it or not. We notice things about others that we recognize in ourselves. This could be why we have a hard time recognizing those who would have little to nothing in common with us. We are more familiar with faces from our own race, thus we are able to remember the faces better. Unfortunately police officers/ law enforcement do not take into account this fact. Even though cross race identification is not very reliable, it is definitely utilized to bring a defendant to trial, and eventually possible incarceration. Not only is eyewitness testimony less than 100% reliable, but cross race identification is even more difficult.

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