Does hidden racial bias change how well we remember other-race faces?
More contact with Asian people predicted better memory for Asian faces, and, unexpectedly, strong face recognisers with a more negative implicit bias toward Asians remembered Asian faces best.
Source
The effect of implicit racial bias on recognition of other-race faces
Study at a glance
- Design
- Cross-sectional — Correlational individual-differences design: old/new face memory task with eye tracking, IAT, CFMT and experience questionnaires, analysed by multiple regression.
- N
- N=53 · 53 Caucasian undergraduates; eye-movement analyses excluded 7 participants with too many rejected trials.
- Population
- Caucasian undergraduates at NYU Abu Dhabi with extensive everyday contact with Asian people
- Outcome
- Recognition memory (d') for Asian vs Caucasian faces, the other-race effect, and horizontal position of the first two fixations during learning
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What they did
White students living in a highly multicultural city studied and then recognised Asian and Caucasian faces while their eye movements were tracked. They also completed an Implicit Association Test measuring implicit attitudes toward Asians, the Cambridge Face Memory Test of face recognition ability, and questionnaires on social contact and individuating experience with each race. Regression models tested whether these three factors, and the bias-by-ability interaction, predicted face memory and where people first looked on the faces.
What they found
More experience with Asian people predicted a smaller other-race effect and better memory for Asian faces. Implicit bias interacted with face recognition ability: among weak face recognisers bias made no difference, but among strong recognisers a more negative bias toward Asians went with better memory for Asian faces and second fixations placed further to the left of the face. Memory for own-race faces was predicted only by face recognition ability, and response-time measures of the other-race effect showed no effects.
The limits
What it doesn't show
This is correlational, so it cannot show that implicit bias causes better or worse face memory; the surprising negative-bias finding comes from a single modest sample and an interaction effect, which needs replication. All participants were White and highly experienced with Asians, so the pattern may not hold for other groups or for people with little contact. Participants came from many countries, so the Caucasian test faces were not a perfect own-race match for everyone, and the proposed explanation (extra attention driven by perceived threat) was not tested.
Key terms
- Other-race effect
- The tendency to recognise faces of one's own race more accurately than faces of other races.
- Implicit Association Test (IAT)
- A reaction-time task that infers automatic attitudes from how quickly people pair social categories with positive or negative words.
- Individuating experience
- Contact that requires telling individual members of a group apart, as opposed to general social exposure.
- Left-side bias
- A tendency to fixate the left side of a face (from the viewer's perspective), linked to better face recognition.
- d prime (d')
- A signal detection measure of how well someone discriminates old from new items, independent of response bias.
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Quiz yourself
Which factor predicted a smaller other-race effect in memory accuracy?
Common questions
Does this mean racial bias is good for memory?
No. The effect appeared only in strong face recognisers and is correlational; the authors speculate that negative bias may draw extra attention to other-race faces, but that was not tested.
Why test people in Abu Dhabi?
Participants there had lots of contact with Asian people but still varied widely in implicit bias, which let the researchers separate the effect of experience from the effect of bias.
Did bias affect memory for own-race faces?
No. Only general face recognition ability predicted memory for Caucasian faces.
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