![\"\"](\"http:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/files\/2019\/11\/cross.png\")
<\/a>No one is safe from the cross race effect.<\/p><\/div>\n
You leave the police station thinking that the person you identified was the criminal. Justice has been served to the burglar, and he will pay for his crimes. Without your help, the law enforcement would have never caught the criminal. Well, Surprise! The actual criminal was actually absent from the police station and was never taken in as a suspect. The person responsible for the crime is still out there somewhere roaming the streets as an innocent person How could this be? (If you want to try to see if you can beat the effect, watch this video.<\/a>) Umezaki, N. (2017).\u00a0Are East Asian people actually more indistinguishable from each other than people from other races? [image].\u00a0https:\/\/www.quora.com\/Are-East-Asian-people-actually-more-indistinguishable-from-each-other-than-people-from-other-races<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Imagine that you have witnessed a crime where a burglar broke into your neighbor\u2019s home and committed assault on the people present in the home. As the burglar left your neighbor\u2019s house, you catch a quick glimpse of the burglar\u2019s face. You are brought in the following week to choose from a list of suspects […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9419,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[80218],"tags":[129787,130349,130420],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5176"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9419"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5176"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5176\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5370,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5176\/revisions\/5370"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5176"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5176"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5176"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nThis phenomenon is known as the cross-race effect, which has been notorious<\/a>for convicting innocent people through both false memories of the description of the person and the failure to recognize other races\u2019 faces. The cross-race effect refers to the instance where a person is more likely to remember faces that are closely associated with their race, while remembering faces from other races as indistinguishable. How does the cross-race effect work exactly? Well, we first need to understand how face recognition works. Face recognition works by identifying faces analytically and holistically. Analyzing faces analytically means that the features of a face (eyes, nose, mouth) are examined first in order to determine if the object in front of you is a face. The other analysis is done holistically, which means that the process recognizes faces as a whole in order to distinguish different faces from each other. Both these processes work together in order to identify individuals. Our judgements on identifying faces should be cautiously examined because our prior knowledge of what a face in a different race would look like tends to reconstruct what was actually seen by an individual. Because our exposure to our own race is the most common, we are better at holistically identifying individuals in our own race because prior knowledge of distinguishing between your own race sometimes is vital (i.e. being able to tell your siblings apart from each other assuming they are the same race).
\nTo understand how the cross race effect works, Payne (2001) conducted a study to understand how and why police officers respond to situations resulting in great consequences due to the victim\u2019s race. In his study, Payne had two faces, one white face and one black face, paired with either a tool or a gun and asked participants to identify the tool or the gun regardless of the face presented. The participants were first primed by being told to do nothing with the face pictures initially (Payne, 2001). Based off the results of the study, we can conclude that our prior knowledge of other races and the stereotypes surrounding other races influences our initial response to how we perceive events (process known as top-down processing: our prior knowledge influencing the events we perceive) Top-down processing allows an individual to process information quickly, however, that often comes at the price of making errors.
\nIn addition to the limitations on identifying different races because of our prior knowledge on stereotypes of other races and mental representation, other researchers wanted to explore whether prejudices could be a result of this reoccurring phenomenon. Ferguson, Rhodes, and Lee (2001) wanted to examine whether prejudices have any significant role in the cross-race effect. In order to measure prejudice, the experimenters gave five phases to the participants showing them 12 photos of Asian faces and 12 photos of Caucasian faces. The results show that the Caucasian participants remembered more Caucasian faces than Asian faces and Asian participants remembered more Asian faces than Caucasian faces. The results failed to show, however, that prejudice scores impacted the number of faces remembered by the participants (Ferguson, Rhodes, and Lee, 2001). This study provided information that the cross-race effect is independent from prejudices, although the cross-race effect presents a larger effect when the individual is perceived to be more prejudice. In addition to prejudice, knowing your own race\u2019s faces better is an explanation as to why prejudice in this study was not very significant.
\nAfter learning about how the cross-race effect functions, we can begin to understand the fallibility of eyewitness testimonies regarding the recall of a suspect who is of another race and why these testimonies tend to be false. In a study conducted by Ho and Pezdek (2015), the categorization-individuation model (CIM) was proposed in order to handle the differences in recognition accuracy in both same-race effect and cross-race effect (Another blogpost goes into futher detail here<\/a>). The results of the study further add to previous studies of cross-race effect noting that identifying faces from other races are encoded based off of feature adding that post encoding continues to occur for both same and cross-race effect (Ho and Pezdek, 2015<\/a>). This study affirms that post encoding continues to happen towards face recognition proving that faces will continue to change slightly in our minds causing the credibility of eyewitness testimonies to be questioned. The results of the study hints at the fact that our memories are reconstructive meaning that our memories are constantly changing proving that our memories are to be taken with a grain of salt.
\nThe cross-race effect is the reason for many deaths of unarmed black people by the police, which the weapon bias study explained the reasoning behind the incidents. The weapon bias study showed how quickly white participants responded to the black face having a gun when in reality the face was paired with a tool. Further research on this topic will help to shine light on measures we as a society can implement to ensure this effect does not impact anymore innocent lives.
\nReferences
\nPayne, B. K. (2001). Prejudice and perception: The Role of Automatic and Controlled Processes in Misperceiving a Weapon. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2, 181-192, DOI: 10.I037\/\/0O22-3514.81.2.181.
\nFerguson, D. P., Rhodes, G., Lee, K., & Sriram, N. (2001). \u2018They all look alike to me’\u201d Prejudice and cross-race face recognition. British journal of psychology, 4, 567-77, DOI:10.1348\/000712601162347
\nHo, M. R., & Pezdek, K. (2015). Postencoding cognitive processes in the cross-race effect: Categorization and individuation during face recognition. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 3, 771-780, https:\/\/doi.org\/10.3758\/s13423-015-0945-x
\nBrown, T., I. (2017). Cognitive control, attention, and other race effect in memory [figure]. https:\/\/journals.plos.org\/plosone\/article?id=10.1371\/journal.pone.0173579<\/p>\n