The Dunning-Kruger Effect refers to a common failure of metacognitive insight in which people who are incompetent in a given domain are unaware of their incompetence. This effect has been found in a wide range of tasks, raising the question of whether there is any 'special' domain in which it is not found. One plausible candidate is face perception, which has sometimes been thought to be 'special'. To test this possibility, we assessed participants' insight into their own face perception abilities (self-estimates) and those of other people (peer estimates). We found classic Dunning-Kruger Effects in matching tasks for unfamiliar identity, familiar identity, gaze direction, and emotional expression. Low performers overestimated themselves, and high performers underestimated themselves. Interestingly, participants' selfestimates were more stable across tasks than their actual performance. In addition, peer estimates revealed a consistent egocentric bias. High performers attributed higher accuracy to other people than did low performers. We conclude that metacognitive insight into face perception abilities is limited and subject to systematic biases. Our findings urge caution when interpreting self-report measures of face perception ability. They also reveal a fundamental source of uncertainty in social interactions.

This research aimed to examine the effects of negative metastereotypes (i.e., patients believe that doctors have negative opinions about them) and conflict experience on doctor-patient relationships. A 2 9 2 experimental study was conducted on 84 outpatients who were randomly assigned to either a negative metastereotype activation (NMSA) condition or a nonnegative metastereotype activation (non-NMSA) condition. Each group consisted of patients with and without conflict experience (CE). Intergroup anxiety and doctor-patient relationships were subsequently assessed. Results showed that NMSA and CE increased intergroup anxiety and undermined doctor-patient relationships. In addition, the interaction between NMSA and CE on doctor-patient relationships was significant. When negative metastereotypes were activated, patients with CE showed more unfavorable relationships with doctors as compared with those under non-NMSA activation condition; no metastereotype effects on doctor-patient relationships were observed among patients without CE. These findings provided insights into an important predictor of doctor-patient relationships as well as its mechanism. Future studies should consider negative metastereotypes and CE to develop interventions for improving doctor-patient relationships.

One of the best-known phenomena in face recognition is the other-race effect, the observation that own-race faces are better remembered than other-race faces. However, previous studies have not put the magnitude of other-race effect in the context of other influences on face recognition. Here, we compared the effects of (a) a race manipulation (own-race/other-race face) and (b) a familiarity manipulation (familiar/unfamiliar face) in a 2 × 2 factorial design. We found that the familiarity effect was several times larger than the race effect in all performance measures. However, participants expected race to have a larger effect on others than it actually did. Face recognition accuracy depends much more on whether you know the person’s face than whether you share the same race.

No abstract

No abstract