Race and facial recognition

Iris Kuo:

Caucasians often look alike -- at least to people who aren't Caucasian. For that matter, blacks often look alike to whites and Hispanics to Asians.

It's not that people of any one race or ethnicity, such as Hispanics, are harder to distinguish; researchers say that individual features vary equally among races and ethnicities. Rather, it's that people have problems telling people from another group apart.

The so-called cross-race effect is something of a misnomer because the phenomenon includes ethnic, cultural and regional groups as well as racial ones.

But such misidentifications aren't due to racism, said Roy Malpass, a psychology professor at the University of Texas at El Paso who has published widely on the cross-race effect. "People make about 50 percent more errors" when they're asked to remember other-race faces, he said.

Malpass bases his estimate on experiments in which researchers asked subjects to study equal numbers of faces from their race and from a different race. After some time passed, the subjects looked at twice the number of faces they'd seen before -- half of them seen in the earlier trial and half introduced for the first time -- and identified those they thought they'd seen before. They all did much better with their own race.

People of another race find it harder to read your face

Children's face recognition memory: More evidence for the cross-race effect

Examining The Cross-Race Effect Using Racially Ambiguous Faces