It is a well known fact that for a Westerner, all the Chinese or Japanese faces look the same. The fact may have some triviality in it, but it can lead from embarrassment or social castigation to eye-witness misidentifications, which is already a severer effect. But what induces the cross-race effect is still a scientific puzzle.
Some psychologists
say that in a society in which segregation is the norm, people are not "trained" to interact with individuals of other races and lack the ability to distinguish traits in those racial types.
Still, a new research developed at Miami University comes with a different opinion of what causes the cross-race effect. They state that this effect is linked to our tendency to assign people into in-groups and out-groups based on social class, hobbies, and race.
In an array of approaches, Miami University undergraduates were led to believe that they were watching the faces of fellow Miami students (the in-group) and students from Marshall University (a historical football rival, the out-group) on a computer screen. In fact, none of the faces belonged to any of the two universities, and all were white. Just by labeling them, the subjects could make a better recognition of the faces believed to belong to their fellow Miami students.
The team led by psychologist Kurt Hugenberg reached the conclusion that recognition deficits can take place without the need for race or different physical traits, showing that unfamiliarity with other races make up the cross-race effect.
"People frequently split the world up into us and them, in other words into social groups, be they racial, national, occupational, or even along the lines of university affiliation. Our work suggests that the cross-race effect is due, at least in part, to this ubiquitous tendency to see the world in terms of these in-groups and out-groups.", the researchers wrote.
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