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Racial Categorization of Faces: The Ambiguous Race Face Effect
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The article by Maclin and Malpass brought up many issues that would effect witness identification. The experiments in this article addressed the issues of the other race effect.
Experiment one was based on rating people’s traits and features. They looked to see if faces were perceived as Hispanic or Black just by changing a single difference in hair style. This hair style change looked at the ambiguous race effect. Interestingly enough the faces were the same, only the hairstyle changed, and yet, the hair feature acted as the racial marker. Depending on which hairstyle was on the face, it influenced peoples opinions on which category of race they would place them in. Ellis, Deregowski, and Shepherd (1975) discovered that people who are white, when describing faces, focus more on an individual’s hair and hair texture as well as their eye color. But African American’s tend to focus more on eye size, eyebrows, and ears.
In experiment two, they wanted to figure out if the other race effect happens when using ambiguous race face stimuli when having individuals complete a task where they have to use recognition skills. It was found that the Hispanic participants recognized the Hispanic faces better than the Black faces. And it was suggested that some faces may be coded categorically.
This article helped me to understand better what the other race effect is, how most people believe that people of their own race appear more unique (look less alike) than those of a different race, and that individuals from a different race look similar. For example, “All Black people look alike”, this is an example of the other race effect.
This topic is important to learn about and study because, as Grabs described, a high amount of people on death row are actually innocent, and are convinced because of a identity mistake (other race identifications). This is a serious problem. Even though we have DNA to help get some of the innocent people off of death row, there may be more to be done which could help to prevent them from getting that far. Understanding the other race effect, and other related topics may be a good start.
S.D.
The research by MacLin and Malpass (2001) and others on racial categorization were in response to a large number of false identifications of people who were later acquitted by DNA evidence. The Technical Working Group for Eyewitness Evidence (1999) does not include anything about the other-race effect. This is scary because witnesses and law enforcement have little experience with minorities and this contributes to unequal treatment and in worst case scenarios, false convictions. At the time of this research, there were no accepted reasons for why the other-race effect worked. The other-race face effect has to do with having a hard time distinguishing individual details between other races. I can agree with this to an extent, but I have heard others agree with this effect, especially on TV. I believe if I were in a situation where I was the witness and had to identify another race, I would have a difficult time doing it.
Two reasons why the other race effect occurs is social attitudes and different contact. There is little empirical data for social attitude hypothesis and the amount of contact a person has to other races is hard to test because you cannot control how much exposure someone has to different race faces. The quality of contact one has had with different races is important. The more important roles people play in our life such as bosses, parents, teachers; more value there is in being able to distinguish between people.
Differential experience hypothesis uses perceptual dimension for determining faces. Face space, introduced by Valentine (1991), takes every face a person has seen and stores it as a mental representation. Distinct faces are easier to recognize than typical ones because there is not as many distinct faces compared to typical faces and in essence searching within face space would not take as long.
The first experiment looked at how the face space model causes the other-race effect by using faces that mixed both Hispanic and African American faces together and had two different racial markers that set them apart. One was given an African American haircut and the other was given a Hispanic looking haircut. Both groups were to distinguish what the race was of the ambiguous face and both the Black and Hispanic participants