The Own-Race Bias for Face Recognition in a Multiracial Society

Abstract

The own-race bias (ORB) is a reliable phenomenon across cultural and racial groups where unfamiliar faces from other races are usually remembered more poorly than ownrace faces (Meissner and Brigham, 2001). By adopting a yes-no recognition paradigm, we found that ORB was pronounced across race groups (Malaysian-Malay, Malaysian-Chinese, Malaysian-Indian, and Western-Caucasian) when faces were presented with only internal features (Experiment 1), implying that growing up in a profoundly multiracial society does not necessarily eliminate ORB. Using a procedure identical to Experiment 1, we observed a significantly greater increment in recognition performance for otherrace faces than for own-race faces when the external features (e.g. facial contour and hairline) were presented along with the internal features (Experiment 2)-this abolished ORB. Contrary to assumptions based on the contact hypothesis, participants' self-reported amount of interracial contact on a social contact questionnaire did not significantly predict the magnitude of ORB. Overall, our findings suggest that the level of exposure to other-race faces accounts for only a small part of ORB. In addition, the present results also support the notion that different neural mechanisms may be involved in processing own-and other-race faces, with internal features of own-race faces being processed more effectively, whereas external features dominate representations of other-race faces.

The Importance of Internal and External Features in Matching Own and Other Race Faces

“…For overall performance across match and mismatch trials, there was an ORB for both the U.K. and Chinese participants for matching faces when the external features had been removed to show only the internal features, and an ORB for whole faces, but only for the U.K. participants. This ORB replicates previous research that has found people are more accurate with own-race faces compared to faces from another race (Brigham & Malpass, 1985;Hancock & Rhodes, 2008;Jackiw et al, 2008;Meissner & Brigham, 2001;Wong et al, 2020). Furthermore, finding an ORB replicates previous face matching studies, suggesting that the phenomena occur during the encoding stage of face perception (Kokje et al, 2018;Megreya, White, et al, 2011;Walker & Tanaka, 2003).…”

Self-reported face recognition abilities for own and other-race faces

“…Our results show that our observers were better recognizing own-race faces compared other-race faces. This pattern of results replicates the ORE observed in other studies (e.g., Chiroro & Valentine, 1995;Estudillo et al, 2020;Malpass & Kravitz, 1969;Meissner & Brigham, 2001;Wong et al, 2020). Interestingly, the ORE observed in our study was also evident at a phenomenological level as observers reported to be worse recognizing other-race faces compared to own-race faces.…”

“…People are generally more efficient and accurate recognizing faces of their own-race compared to other-race faces. This effect, which is known as the other-race effect (ORE, Malpass and Kravitz, 1969), is evident across different cultures and countries (Meissner and Brigham, 2001) and has been found with different paradigms, including perceptual matching (Kokje et al , 2018; Megreya et al , 2011), face recognition (Chiroro and Valentine, 1995; Estudillo et al , 2020; Malpass and Kravitz, 1969; Wong et al , 2020) and line-up identification tasks (Evans et al , 2009). A meta-analysis study comprising nearly 5000 participants across 39 different studies showed that people are 2.23 times more likely to recognize own-race faces compared to other-race faces (Meissner and Brigham, 2001).…”

Involuntary responses to facial cues as an indicator of personality type across age and culture

“…As such, the processes involved in demonstrating the other-ethnicity effects are impacted by the level of social factors such as the degree of experience an individual has with other-ethnicity, i.e., when an individual has exposure to other-ethnicity groups, their performance might be similar to that of ownethnicity participants (Walker & Hewstone, 2006;Walker et al, 2008). On the contrary, recent work by Wong et al (2020) has suggested that social contact with other-ethnicity does not necessarily improve other-ethnicity judgements. Furthermore, work by Sporer (1999) has reported that Turkish participants did not differ in their ability to recognize Turkish and German faces, whereas German participants demonstrated an own-ethnicity effect.…”

“…Researchers have also demonstrated that the process of the ownethnicity effect is impacted by the level of social factors such as the degree of experience an individual has with another ethnicity, i.e., when an individual has exposure to other-ethnicity groups, their performance might be similar to that of ownethnicity participants (Walker et al, 2008;Walker & Hewstone, 2006). On the contrary, recent studies have demonstrated that own-ethnicity bias is unaffected by social contact (Wong et al, 2020). As such, one of the potential limitations of the present study is the lack of information on exposure to Caucasian groups -it had been assumed that given the ubiquity of Western media, Indian participants would have some familiarity with Caucasian faces, but we had no means of independently measuring this.…”