Gender studies

Sociology

Social science

Image (mathematics)

Orb (optics)

Epistemology

Philosophy

Cognitive psychology

Artificial intelligence

Psychology

Face (sociological concept)

Computer science

Phenomenon

Race (biology)

Social psychology

Frontiers in Psychology

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 own-race faces (Meissner & Brigham, 2001). By adopting a yes/no recognition paradigm, we found that the 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 multi-racial society does not necessarily eliminate the ORB. Using a procedure identical to Experiment 1, we observed a significantly greater increment in recognition performance for other-race 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 the 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 the ORB. Overall, our findings suggest that the level of exposure to other-race faces accounts for only a small part of the ORB. In addition, the present results also support the notion that different processing mechanisms may be involved for 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 Own-Race Bias for Face Recognition in a Multiracial Society