title: A cultural setting where the other-race effect on face recognition has no social-motivational component and derives entirely from lifetime perceptual experience.
abstract: Competing approaches to the other-race effect (ORE) see its primary cause as either a lack of motivation to individuate social outgroup members, or a lack of perceptual experience with other-race faces. Here, we argue that the evidence supporting the social-motivational approach derives from a particular cultural setting: a high socio-economic status group (typically US Whites) looking at the faces of a lower status group (US Blacks) with whom observers typically have at least moderate perceptual experience. In contrast, we test motivation-to-individuate instructions across five studies covering an extremely wide range of perceptual experience, in a cultural setting of more equal socio-economic status, namely Asian and Caucasian participants (N = 480) tested on Asian and Caucasian faces. We find no social-motivational component at all to the ORE, specifically: no reduction in the ORE with motivation instructions, including for novel images of the faces, and at all experience levels; no increase in correlation between own- and other-race face recognition, implying no increase in shared processes; and greater (not the predicted less) effort applied to distinguishing other-race faces than own-race faces under normal ("no instructions") conditions. Instead, the ORE was predicted by level of contact with the other-race. Our results reject both pure social-motivational theories and also the recent Categorization-Individuation model of Hugenberg, Young, Bernstein, and Sacco (2010). We propose a new dual-route approach to the ORE, in which there are two causes of the ORE-lack of motivation, and lack of experience--that contribute differently across varying world locations and cultural settings.
authors.affiliation: Research School of Psychology, The Australian National University, Australia; ARC Centre for Excellence in Cognition and Its Disorders, The Australian National University, Australia.
authors.forename: Lulu
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Wan
authors.affiliation: School of Psychology and ARC Centre for Excellence in Cognition and Its Disorders, University of Western Australia, Australia.
authors.forename: Kate
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Crookes
authors.affiliation: Research School of Psychology, The Australian National University, Australia.
authors.forename: Katherine J
authors.initials: KJ
authors.lastname: Reynolds
authors.affiliation: Research School of Psychology, The Australian National University, Australia; ARC Centre for Excellence in Cognition and Its Disorders, The Australian National University, Australia.
authors.forename: Jessica L
authors.initials: JL
authors.lastname: Irons
authors.affiliation: Research School of Psychology, The Australian National University, Australia; ARC Centre for Excellence in Cognition and Its Disorders, The Australian National University, Australia. Electronic address: elinor.mckone@anu.edu.au.
authors.forename: Elinor
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: McKone
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D001288:Attention / Q000502:physiology; D005145:Face; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D009042:Motivation / Q000502:physiology*; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual / Q000502:physiology*; D044469:Racial Groups; D011930:Reaction Time / Q000502:physiology; D012938:Social Perception; D055815:Young Adult
keywords: Contact; Cross-race effect; Face recognition; Ingroup–outgroup; Other-race effect; Own-race bias