Cross-race effect

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The cross-race-effect (also cross-race-bias , other-race-bias or cross-race-identification-bias ) describes the poorer recognition performance of faces that do not come from one's own ethnic group (from so-called foreign group faces ) in comparison with faces of their own ethnic group. This impairment of face recognition has, among other things. a. As a result, people are also less able to recognize emotions that show on their faces in people of foreign ethnicities than in people of their own ethnic group. The cross-race effect is the subject of research both in the field of human ethology and in the field of social psychology .

There is no common German equivalent for the English terms Cross-Race-Effect or Cross-Race-Bias ; they mean "distortions of perception in relation to other races ", whereby it should be noted that race is also used in English in the sense of ethnicity.

Research on the cross-race effect

An analysis of many studies on emotion recognition in faces revealed that people within a culture can recognize the emotions of their own group members better than outsiders. This has been very well documented, especially for relatives within an ethnic culture. The reason for this lies in the different shape of the faces of a culture, which means that different details of facial expressions are used to decode the emotions of a face. If these facial features are not used in other cultures, one quickly has the feeling that one cannot “read” the face. Anyone who has ever lived in a completely different culture (e.g. as a Western European in China) knows how difficult it is at first to just remember faces; the members of the foreign country all seem alike at first. Over time, however, the brain gets used to the different shape of the face and to their facial features. Comparable to this is that you learn to decode, for example, whether laughter is a sign of joy or a sign of embarrassment.

According to a study by Kent State University , white people find it more difficult to correctly identify the faces of black people than other whites. This is due to the fact that with faces of foreign ethnicities more attention is paid to the specific ethnic differences and not to the individual characteristics. The “black face” is perceived as an essential feature, but not details such as the shape of the mouth, beard growth and the like. People from other groups are therefore classified and not perceived as individualized.

The advantage of the in-group also results from the fact that the innate motivation (“cross-race bias”) to “read” the face of a foreign culture is rather low. In 1996, Hess, Senecal & Kirouac were able to demonstrate that the motivation to recognize emotions decreased the moment the test subjects realized that the face belongs to a foreign culture.

In order to discuss whether the cross-race effect or the cross-race bias can be influenced, the following important study by Paul Ekman , one of the leading researchers in this field, should be shown: Ekman and Friesen were able to show that alone in 1976 contact with a foreign culture can increase the emotional recognition rate. They showed a New Guinea tribe pictures of Americans who were either smiling, angry, or looking sad. The tribal people who had already had contact with Americans were able to read the emotions on the faces of the Americans significantly better. This attempt was repeated by Ducci, Arcuri, Georgis and Sineshaw in 1982. This time they drove to Ethiopia and compared the recognition performance of Ethiopians who lived in remote villages with that of Ethiopians in cities where contact with Americans was high.

These results, as well as the results of the meta-analysis by Elfenbein and Ambady from 2002, show that there is such a thing as “cultural emotion learning”. Important factors in this cultural emotion learning are the duration and frequency of contact with other cultures. This emotional learning happens automatically even if you simply live in another culture and are exposed to its otherness. The brain automatically learns to better process and decode the information contained in the face of the other culture.

Economic consequences of the cross-race effect

In a globalized world in which thousands of people of different ethnicities communicate with each other via contracts, licenses, political agreements and international collaborations, the negative effects of the cross-race effect are clearly evident. Alexander Thomas from the Chair for Intercultural Communication in Regensburg (2003) assumes that at least 50% of the negotiations between Germans and Chinese fail. Even a successfully concluded contract negotiation leads to 60 to 70% of suboptimal deals. According to "Trends in Managing Mobility 2007", 30% of the failed negotiations can be traced back indirectly to the cross-race effect. Effects of the cross-race effect are e.g. B. low emotional intelligence, poor communication skills, lack of empathy and incorrect assessments of the communication partner of the foreign country.

In-group advantage

From the point of view of social psychology, the cross-race effect is a special form of the in-group advantage - namely limited to intercultural or interethnic aspects.

In-group advantage means that people evaluate and present members of their own group as better than people who do not belong to their group (out-group disadvantage). The term group can mean anything from family members to all of humanity. It is only important that you distinguish yourself from others through this group, e.g. B. through the group "own family" of other families or through belonging to the group "human" of the animals.

However, an American-Chinese research team showed that 35% of the individual differences in face recognition are due to genetic factors, i.e. the basic talent for face recognition is also partly inherited. And Nancy Kanwisher from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology was the first to show that the human brain with the fusiform gyrus is a specialized area for facial recognition. The fusiform gyrus only reacts to human faces, not to pictures of animals - they are processed by the brain like pictures of objects.

Social psychologists were able to show that assumptions that the other person belongs to the same football club or has the same taste in music as you can trigger an in-group advantage. If membership of a certain culture is chosen as the group formation factor, it is referred to as the cross-race effect.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ “They all look the same!” Factors influencing the different recognition performance of faces of one's own ethnic group and faces of other ethnic groups (cross-race bias). ( Memento of December 17, 2005 in the Internet Archive ) Dissertation (2005).
  2. ^ Hillary Anger Elfenbein, Nalini Ambady: On the universality and cultural specificity of emotion recognition: A meta-analysis. In: Psychological Bulletin. Volume 128, No. 2, 2002. doi: 10.1037 // 0033-2909.128.2.203 , full text (PDF) , pp. 203-235
  3. ^ T. Anthony, C. Cooper, B. Mullen: Cross-racial facial identification: A social cognitive integration. In: Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. Volume 18, 1992. pp. 296-301
  4. ^ A b SL Sporer: Recognizing Faces of Other Ethnic Groups. In: Public Policy and Law. Volume 7 (1), 2001. pp. 36-97.
  5. ^ A b S. L. Sporer: The Cross-Race Effect. In: Psychology, Public Policy, and Law. Volume 7 (1), 2001. pp. 170-200.
  6. ^ Daniel T. Levin, Ph.D .: Journal of Experimental Psychology: General. (Vol. 129, No. 4): Race as a Visual Feature: Using Visual Search and Perceptual Discrimination Tasks to Understand Face Categories and the Cross-Race Recognition Deficit (PDF file; 1.13 MB).
  7. ^ People Are Poor at Cross-Race Facial Recognition Because They Concentrate on Racial Features Rather than Individual Features, According to New Study. American Psychological Association , accessed June 21, 2010.
  8. ↑ U. Hess, A. Kappas, R. Bause: The intensity of facial expression is determined by underlying affective states and social situations. In: Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Volume 69 (2), 1995. pp. 280-288
  9. ^ ECA International (2007): Trends in Managing Mobility 2007
  10. ↑ Fanny Jiménez: Why we can recognize faces at lightning speed. On: welt.de from December 10, 2011.
  11. ^ E.g. M. Beaupre: An Ingroup Advantage for Confidence in Emotion Recognition Judgments: The Moderating Effect of Familiarity With the Expressions of Outgroup Members. In: Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. Volume 32, No. 1, 2006. pp. 16-26.