‘Other things being equal, individuals of a given race are distinguishable from each other in proportion to our familiarity, to our contact with the race as a whole. Thus, to the uninitiated American, all Asiatics look alike, while to the Asiatics, all white men look alike.’ (Feingold, 1914, Journal of Criminal Law and Political Science, Vol. 5, pp.39–51)
People are experts at recognising faces; they can recognise thousands of people at a glance (Maurer et al. 2002). It has been well established, however, that people tend to recognise own-race faces better than other-race faces (Slone et al. 2000). This phenomenon is known as the own-race bias, and is captured insightfully by Feingold (1914) in the above quotation. Feingold was the first person to research own-versus other-race face perception and perceptual discrimination. Today, this research area has widespread and important theoretical and practical implications (e.g. eyewitness identification, immigration and border controls).
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