Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Mark Schaller
University of British Columbia
Quick Overview
• Background on the outgroup homogeneity bias
in recognition memory.
– What it is.
– Why it happens.
– Implications for its disappearance.
• Experiment testing novel hypothesis about a
specific set of circumstances under which the
bias disappears.
– And sometimes even reverses.
• Implications.
Outgroup Homogeneity Bias in
Recognition Memory
• The “They all look the same to me” effect.
• Recognition memory for faces of ethnic ingroup
members is reasonably accurate.
– High accuracy in distinguishing previously-seen
faces from faces encountered for the first time.
• But recognition memory for faces of outgroup
members is typically much worse.
– Much greater tendency for people to mistakenly
believe that they’ve previously seen a particular
outgroup member when, in fact, they haven’t.
A Robust and Important Effect
0.90
0.80
0.70
0.60
Neutral Expressions Angry Expressions
Additional Methods and Results
• Two additional manipulations:
– Actual presentation time (½ sec., 1 sec., 4 sec.)
– Distracter image either present or absent when each
target face originally presented.
• Were ample cognitive resources necessary for
increased accuracy in recognizing angry Black
faces?
• No; the opposite was true:
– Reversal of usual bias occurred most strongly under
conditions of least processing time (1/2 sec.
presentation time coupled with distraction).
– Implies highly efficient encoding of individuating
features of angry outgroup faces.
Implications & Future Directions
• Immediate questions for future research:
– Does this effect hold with other ethnic ingroup /
outgroup categories?
– Is this effect specific to angry facial expressions?
• Broader implications:
– A more nuanced perspective on the so-called
outgroup homogeneity bias.
– Implications for eyewitness identification?
– Utility of functional perspective on social cognition.
Thank You
Collaborators:
Josh Ackerman, Vaughn Becker, Vladas Griskevicius, Doug Kenrick,
Jon Maner, Steve Neuberg, Jenessa Shapiro
Funding:
United States National Institutes of Health