The cross-race effect, also called the other-race effect or own-race bias, is the tendency for people to be less accurate at recognizing and distinguishing faces of a race or ethnicity different from their own compared with faces of their own race. The effect has been demonstrated repeatedly in facial recognition experiments since research on it began in the early twentieth century and expanded substantially from the 1960s onward, and it carries practical significance for the reliability of eyewitness identification in criminal justice settings. Leading explanations for the effect combine a perceptual expertise account, in which people gain more practice distinguishing faces of races they encounter more often, with a social-categorization account, in which faces of an unfamiliar race are processed more by group category than by individuating features.
Facts
Core ClaimPeople recognize and distinguish faces from their own racial group more easily than faces from a racial group they have had little contact with. 1 First Described Year Classification
Type of Phenomenon Sources
1. Wikipedia: Cross-Race Effect
Wikimedia FoundationWikipedia lead section, sentence 1
The cross-race effect (sometimes called cross-race bias, other-race bias, own-race bias or other-race effect) is the tendency to more easily recognize faces that belong to one's own racial group, or racial groups that one has been in contact with.
Wikipedia History section, sentence 1
The first research study on the cross-race effect was published in 1914.
lead section, phenomenon-kind classification
The cross-race effect (sometimes called cross-race bias, other-race bias, own-race bias or other-race effect) is the tendency to more easily recognize faces that belong to one's own racial group, or racial groups that one has been in contact with.
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