Inability to Distinguish Different Races Not a Sign of Racism, Study Says

It's a phenomenon that causes eyewitness misidentifications, social stigma, or embarrassment. The inability to distinguish individual faces of other races may not be a sign of racism, but a subconscious phenomenon where the brain groups people based on familiar and non familiar characteristics, according to new research from Miami University.

The inability to identify individuals out of an unfamiliar racial group has a long and consistently documented and lamented by many. Called the "cross-race effect", this occurrence is often embodied in the common, but insulting phrase "they all look the same."

Psychologists have long argued that this phenomenon has more to do with the mind's lack of practice at identifying and distinguishing different racial characteristics, especially because most of the world remains highly segregated.However, researchers at Miami University argue that the cross-race effect has little to do with race, but instead has to do with humans categorizing people into in-groups and out-groups. Sometimes these groups are based on racial lines, but individuals can also group people by something as innocuous as a hobby.

In the study, undergraduates from Miami University were told that they were going to look at images of Miami University students and students from a rival university.

However, the researchers used images that were not students from either university. All of the images were also of Caucasians. The researchers found that the participants better recognized the faces of students identified to be Miami University students, even though there was no difference between the two sets of images. The only possible thing that could have helped them in the identification was the idea that the supposed Miami University student images belonged to their social group.

"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," said the Miami University researchers in a press release. "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 at Miami University argue that the cross-race effect may in fact pertain less to lack of experience in identifying different races, but instead be indicative a more complex system the brain uses in recognition.

SOURCES:

"Why we are unable to distinguish faces of other races (and sometimes our own)" Eurekalert. URL: (http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2007-08/afps-wwa081407.php)