Abstract
The present paper represents a literature review on the subject of own-race bias – a set of scientific articles reporting about empirical and theoretical studies in the sphere are analyzed to estimate the present-day progress of the research and outline the possible directions of future research that may be undertaken in the discussed sphere. The articles discussed concern the biological, psychological, and societal origins of the ORB effect, examination of its application by representatives of different races in the face recognition of similar-race or cross-race faces. Another sphere that is given a proper account is the investigation of age differences in the expression of the ORB effect as well as consideration of other individual characteristics such as cognitive functioning, racial attitudes, social experiences, etc.
Introduction
The issue of racial biases has acquired vital importance within the past decade since the debates over racial discrimination have been resumed with greater force and severity. It has always been a proven fact that people have different implicit attitudes towards different categories of people and reveal them in a set of life situations with a frequency that allows speaking about a certain sort of statistics. It is a social and, at the same time, psychological phenomenon that helps understand how people subconsciously treat people and what attitudes and reactions they may cause in them.
An individual’s attitude and perception are based on a set of biases that have been formed either historically, culturally, socially, or deliberately by means of education and upbringing outer influence of certain authorities. The biases may be traced to ethical preferences of the young to the old, of people of one race to people of another one, etc. In addition, it is important to note that the racial bias that will be discussed in the present paper is one of the most evident and outlined ones. It is revealed in preferences, better attitudes, and antipathy expressed by people of one race towards representatives either of their ethnicity or of another one.
Racial biases have become more important because of the intensifying tempos of globalization and overall social integration: human resources are becoming mobile, people move from one country to another, and big cities are gradually turning into metropolitan areas that host representatives of nearly all countries of the world. It is not surprising that under these conditions, an individual is urged to co-exist and correlate with representatives of other cultures, religions, and races on an everyday basis: in a shop, in the streets, even at home when dealing with service workers, etc.
The problem of intolerance towards another race, preferences built upon racial belonging had become a true problem when anti-discrimination laws were issued protecting people exposed to negative attitudes and segregation – as soon as the governments of many countries became obsessed with their citizens’ equality with the rest of the world, the underlying processes and events that construct subconscious biases have become the focus of scientific and research attention.
For the reason of extreme actuality and importance of all implications of racial biases, the present work is devoted to the own-race bias, inner mental processes that cause it, and it’s inner as well as outer implications. Various examples of research dedicated to own-race bias, with more particular attention paid to such an implication thereof as the quality of face recognition, will be considered and analyzed with the purpose of identifying the state of progress in the discussed sphere of scientific study.
Literature Review
Own-race bias as a phenomenon has been studied for quite a long period of time till now, so it is fully possible to say that there is a sound basis for the continuation of research in the given sphere. There have been many findings that may help scientists understand the unconscious implications and outer revelations of implicit racial biases, and this is why a thorough literature review is necessary to adequately assess the progress made up to the present moment in this sphere of studies.
The main aspect of the own-race bias that represents the initial concern for scientists is the origin of the phenomenon and the way it developed and formed into what it constitutes now – this information might be extremely helpful in further studies thereof, which was emphasized by the researchers.
“As such, explaining the origins and potential plasticity of implicit racial biases could aid our understanding of the interaction between human cognitive and social processing, and help address real-world social biases” (Lebrecht et al., 2009).
The most important aspect of an own-race bias that may be empirically observed by researchers and that facilitates its better understanding as well as making certain qualitative conclusions is the quality of face recognition. The initial hypothesis put forward by researchers is that people recognize own-race faces much better than cross-race faces.
Many scientists such as Iris Blandon-Gitlin, Catherine E. Boyd, John C. Brigham, Kathy Pezdek, Sophie Lebrecht, Christian A. Meissner, Catherine Moore, Lara J. Pierce, James W. Tanaka, Michael J. Tarr, Colin G. Tredoux, Daniel B. Wright, and many others have been occupied by estimating the level o differences in recognizing faces depending on various demographic characteristics such as age, social background, ethnicity, and racial belonging. They have achieved many results that may assist in further research enormously.
The first article to be mentioned is the work of Meissner and Brigham (2001), which is devoted to summarizing all their findings for more than thirty years of work on face recognition as the main implication of the own-race bias. The study includes theoretical literary research together with an empirical examination of nearly 5,000 participants. Researchers summarized a huge number of cases of implementation of ORB in law proceedings trying to identify the level of reliability of the ORB effect. For this purpose, they have started a set of goals for their research, including an inquiry into whether the results of studies are replicable, whether they are applicable for all racial groups and whether they vary for different intellectual tasks given to respondents.
Summarizing their findings, it is necessary to turn attention to the following peculiarities of ORB expression by various groups of respondents that may be highly relevant in the future studies:
“White participants were more likely to demonstrate the ORB, especially with regard to false alarm responses. Additionally, ORB effects were more likely in measures of discrimination accuracy when presentation and testing were blocked by a race of face and when study time was reduced. Measures of response criterion demonstrated ORB effects when stimuli differed between study and test and when the retention interval between study and test was increased” (Meissner and Brigham, 2001).
C. Michel et al. (2006) are also concerned with the questions of the general ORB effect, which may be seen in face recognition by representatives of different races, so they have conducted an empirical study with 30 Caucasian and 30 Asian students who were offered to take part in the experiment on own-race and cross-race face identification. The essence of the experiment was a holistic approach taken by the researchers: the respondents were offered not only to identify or individualize a face but to compose the whole of constituent parts, i.e., to conduct a holistic process.
In the process of an experiment, the respondents were shown a set of faces of their own race and another race and then were offered to identify new and old faces. As a result, both races, Caucasian and Asian, were much better at identifying their races’ faces. The same situation took place during the section of an experiment that concerned identifying aligned and misaligned photos – both races showed a clear ORB effect:
“the representations underlying holistic face perception are coarsely defined, being able to accommodate faces of a different race to a certain extent. However, these representations are specific enough that holistic processing is more important for faces with which one has the extensive visual experience, namely, SR faces” (Michel et al., 2006).
However, there is also evidence of research that proved an absence of the ORB effect in certain studies, as, for example, the article of Yuhan Dong et al. (2003) investigating a single criminal case with the participation of a Caucasian in one situation and an Asian in another one. All sixty-nine respondents showed an absence of any ORB effect, so the researchers took an active interest in the possible range of reasons for this. The bias towards a certain race was not witnessed in the course of the study, but as the researchers estimated, they observed the ORB effect in the unexpected part of the experiment, while the two characters in the video watched by the respondents changed their place, which was noticed by very few Caucasians and practically all Asians. This ORB effect revealed certain implications for further research in the undiscovered sphere of ORB (Dong et al., 2003).
Another topic touched upon by ORB researchers is the dependence of the level of ORB on the age of respondents. The research of Kathy Pezdek et al. (2003) outlines the results of an experiment conducted with the purpose of finding out the possible interconnection of age with the intensity of ORB. However, the results implied that there is no difference in perceiving one’s own race and another race of a child and an adult, thus showing that ORB is an unconscious phenomenon developed without any interdependence with age or growing up. Children showed a much lower quality of memorizing faces, which was explained by their small volume of memory. However, in all other characteristics concerning the ORB effect, the indicators remained practically identical.
Some researchers went further and specified their research to a limited number of nations, thus narrowing their research. In the present paper, articles that represent a special interest in the context of the research are the works of such authors as Wright, Boyd, and Tredoux (2001, 2003), who examined the ORB implications in South Africa and England. These scientists made a great contribution to the work on ORB and its revelation principles as their empirical study of two geographical areas with completely different races representing their population facilitated understanding of ORB enormously and gave many relevant practical considerations.
The mentioned authors have two relevant works, the first in the field study conducted by them in 2001, during which they questioned 201 respondents in South Africa and England on the subject of cross-race facial recognition. The results of the experiment supported the initial idea of ORB because of a much higher level of own-race face recognition. However, the study also included another aspect: the confederate who approached respondents and his/her race also influenced the accuracy and quality of face recognition. If respondents were questioned by a person of their race, they gave a higher quality reply (Wright et al., 2001).
This field study and its findings were applied in another research conducted in 2003 with students of two universities, one in South Africa and another one – in England. One hundred fifty students were shown photos of people of their own race and of another race. The findings again supported the idea of ORB, in addition to proving that African Americans had a much stronger inter-racial contact because of a higher level of correct and accurate responses (Wright et al., 2003).
In the context of focusing on separate races in the process of research on the subject of ORB, it is also essential to pay attention to the work of Sloane, Brigham, and Meissner (2000) an identification of the level of ORB in whites. The study included questioning 129 Caucasian respondents on the subject of their face recognition of both Caucasian and African American faces. It also included the repeated session of face recognition several days after the initial one. As a result, a strong own-race bias was evident from the results as well as own-sex bias was witnessed on a regular basis. In the process of the study, such variables that were potentially able to affect the results of the respondent’s activity as measures of memory, cognitive functioning, racial attitudes, and social experiences were taken into consideration to reduce the limitations of the research. However, the findings explicitly showed that the individual differences of respondents had a minimal impact on their face recognition, thus showing the standardized, generalized ORB effect.
However, one should not forget that the ORB effect is not only the product of cognition and genetics but also has a strong social influence, such as the impact of stereotypes, upbringing and personal experience. Many of ORB implications have been formed because of the social environment of respondents, thus adequate attention has to be paid to this aspect of the discussed phenomenon. Lebrecht et al. (2009) study the social influence on the ORB in Caucasian subjects exposed to questioning about African American faces. The results shown in the study witness a heavy social emphasis people make in their face recognition, however assuring that the situation is changeable under the condition of the correct approach:
“Our results establish a causal link between the Other-Race Effect and implicit racial bias. We demonstrate that training that ameliorates the perceptual Other-Race Effect also reduces socio-cognitive implicit racial bias. These findings suggest that implicit racial biases are multifaceted, and include malleable perceptual skills that can be modified with relatively little training” (Lebrecht et al., 2009).
Besides social implications of the own-race bias it is also necessary to turn the scholarly attention to possible biological reasons for its existence, which was made by Turk, Handy and Gazzaniga (2005) in their ‘split-brain study’ devoted to possible biological and physiological factors influencing the formation of the ORB effect in the majority of individuals, no matter to what race they belong. Their study’s results showed clear evidence of the fact that the activity in both hemispheres is at different levels while conducting the process of face recognition. The left hemisphere was stated not to react on face recognition either for one’s own race or for another race; however, the right hemisphere showed different levels of activity while identifying an own-race face or an other-race face:
“our data indicate that the ORB in face recognition appears to be dependent upon right-lateralized cognitive processes. While feature-based or categorical representations employed by the left hemisphere may enable a degree of successful face processing across all racial face-types, it is clearly not as effective as relying on right hemisphere processes associated with perceptual expertise, reflected in more configural or coordinate representations” (Turk et al., 2005).
Thus, it is clear that ORB is a result of biological activity of the human brain together with all psychological, social and individual processes taking place in the human organism and influencing his or her perception of individuals of a similar or another race. Nevertheless, the research concerning ORB should not be limited to the identification of possible reasons causing it but should be expanded to the level of fighting the existing biases and enforcing training aimed at their elimination. In this context, the work of Johnson and Fredrickson (2005) constitutes major importance, since it discusses the application of positive emotions therapy as a means of eradicating ORB. They conducted their study with 89 respondents and identified a strong effect and a significant reduction of ORB under the condition of viewing people they would further identify in the state of positive emotions. This finding is a real breakthrough in the process of the ORB studies which opens new ways to understanding the ORB and overcoming it as a factor negatively influencing cross-cultural communication and reciprocal racial perception.
Exploration of most valuable ideas
First of all, it is necessary to note the article of Kathy Pezdek et al. (2005) exploring the interdependence of age and the level of formation of the own-race bias. It is a very efficient and relevant study as it gives a better understanding of what processes really take place in the growing human brain and how human perception of his race and other races changes within a certain period of time. The study gave highly important results that will have their value not only in the context of studying the ORB effect but in the context of child care and nursing etc. Children have been proven to have an actually in-born own-race bias which may be very helpful in understanding the core essence of the phenomenon.
The findings of the present study ruin the supposition that stereotyping is a conscious process that is formed due to inappropriate and limited education as well as upbringing, and may also result from the limited conscience of the individual who thinks operating simplistic terms, making no inferences thus applying stereotypes in his or her life. However, it was evident from the study that the ORB effect is somewhat genetic, hence being not formed during raising the child but being inherent in him or her from their very birth.
The study indicating the in-born cultural and racial bias may be a significant step forward in the arrangement of methods of overcoming the ORB effect – instead of being oriented at the way to eliminate negative experiences and influences at the very beginning of the child’s life way and accumulation of knowledge scientists should pay their attention to the fact that the quality of making stereotypes judgments is already indispensable in the child, thus creating a set of means to restructure the subconscious perception of a child in a more positive way that would reduce the impact of biases on his or her system of attitudes.
The authors of the study have discovered a huge potential of studies of age differences in the level of formation of biases, thus including the possibility of a genetic predisposition to biases and racial segregation, giving a good opportunity to take this fact into account and have a look at the bias problem from another angle, facilitating the discovery of a more efficient and productive way of fighting biases that have been formed for centuries.
The second article that constitutes high importance and includes innovative information about the concept of ORB is the one of Turk et al. (2005). The authors have made a serious breakthrough in the investigation of the human brain activity in the process of face recognition, thus assuming that the brain initially perceives people of another race in a way different from that of similar-race recognition. The fact that there is a biological interdependence of ORB and the brain activity also drastically changes the way scientists may address the problem of biases and stereotyping.
Again, the finding is revolutionary because stereotyping, and biases as the outer expressions thereof have been considered either the drawbacks of education and upbringing, or the pitfalls and side effects of social, political, geographical and other environment that influences the formation of an individual through his or her whole life. Through the prism of ethics and morality, people who are subject to being guided by stereotypes have always been considered limited, ignorant and unethical, immoral. This attitude has been recently formed as a response to racial or gender discrimination, so that nowadays very much attention is paid to the issue of biases and their origins.
Judging from the point of view of the results achieved in the course of the experiment of Turk et al. (2005), it becomes evident that the individual is mostly not responsible for his or her formation of stereotypes and may be affected by them on a biological and physical and not on psychological or aesthetical level. These inferences let the researchers understand the whole scope of the multiple implications of the ORB phenomenon in the context of human existence in the multi-cultural society and continue exploring the ways to eliminate this natural, genetic predisposition for the benefit of the globalized, modernized society that is gradually erasing all borders and limits, thus leaving no place for cross-racial biases anymore.
The third article worth separate attention is the one of Johnson and Fredrickson (2005) concerning the possibility of reducing the impact of ORB on the perception of representatives of other races by separate individuals. Much research has been conducted on the issue of identifying the origin of own-race bias, the processes underlying its formation and the multiple ways of its revelation in everyday life. However, much less attention has been devoted to the issues of overcoming of ORB even under the condition of everyone’s understanding of the whole scope of negative consequences it brings about.
Thus, the research and results of an empirical experiment showing that the ORB effect, even being a genetic predisposition of representatives of practically all races, is not irresistible to outer influence, may introduce an innovative trend in studying the ORB effect that will be directed at eliminating its negative influence on the everyday life and interaction of individuals. The main emphasis that should be made in this context is understanding of the fact that this bias surely exists in every society, it is inherent in every human being who realizes his or her belonging to a certain group of people thus juxtaposing themselves to other groups existing in the world. Judging from this point, it is possible to build a new, more constructive approach to overcoming the own-race bias that will eliminate the boundaries preventing people from overall integration and efficient collaboration on all levels of their lives in the new, globalized world.
Conclusion
The literary review on the subject of the origin and multifaceted implications of the ORB effect in the process of human interaction, namely in the process of cross-race face recognition, shows that the phenomenon of own-race bias is the inherent biological characteristics of every individual that is formed biologically and is strengthened in the process of the human life and interaction with his or her environment. Multiple studies, empirical and theoretical research have shown that people of all races have a clearly expressed own-race bias that forms an altered idea about other races and affects their perception, making it far from objective.
There is a set of studies that emphasize the biological origin of ORB thus making the prior assumptions about its moral, educational and ethical background insufficient. Surely it is wrong to neglect the impact of surrounding people and the dominating philosophy of treating other races in the environment in which the individual lives, interacts and shares his and her experience. However, the main role in the stipulation of the discussed problem and future research in the sphere of ways to reduce its negative impact should be based on understanding the fact that the ORB effect is a biological capability of a human being which may be altered but not eliminated initially.
The field of ORB research is still a comparatively young one, giving a set of opportunities for scholars to make their own contribution in the developing sphere. Consequently, realizing all implications of the ORB effect as well as its true origin and hidden mechanisms that guide its application in life by every individual is worth separate close attention. By means of investigating all evident and hidden examples of ORB that may be witnessed through empirical studies of cross-cultural estimation may give a sound basis for working out a set of methods of reducing the impact of ORB on everyday human activities and interaction.
Annotated Bibliography
Dong, Y. et al. (2003). “The Effects of Same-Race Bias on Memory and Perception”. Web.
Summary: The present work describes an experiment with 69 respondents who were offered to view a video recording from a robbery with the participation of a Caucasian in one case and an Asian in another one. The reaction and possible implications of the ORB effect were carefully investigated, and surprisingly the results showed complete absence of the ORB effect in a regular understanding. The project achieved another aim and showed a typically different application of the ORB effect during the experiment: the observers of Caucasian race showed their inability to individualize while they were good at categorizing Asians. Asians, in their turn, showed a much better ability to both categorize and individualize Caucasians, thus suggesting a new field of research in the sphere of ORB.
Johnson, K.J. and Fredrickson, B.L. (2005). “We All Look the Same to Me”. Psychological Science, Vol. 16, No. 11, pp. 875-881.
Summary: the authors of the article investigated the possible influence on the ORB effect that may be produced by positive emotions. Their main hypothesis was that people in the neutral or negative state of mood are more exposed to own-race biases, hostility and stereotyping than people in a good mood or those viewing positive emotions. The hypothesis was proven on the example of 89 Caucasian respondents who revealed a much lower level of ORB after viewing the videos with African American people who they needed to identify and individualize. The results suggest a potentially prospective field of study in the process of which a larger share of stereotyping and ORB may be overcome under the positive emotions approach.
Lebrecht, S. et al. (2009). “Perceptual other-race Training Reduces Implicit Racial Bias”. Web.
Summary: the mentioned study is devoted to the issues of establishing the level of ORB in Caucasians towards African Americans and defining a set of ways of training that would enhance overcoming ORB effect issues and would decrease the own-race bias in the target group. The results of the study show a clear presence of ORB in practically all respondents, but give a promising beginning in the field of overcoming the ORB effect and in reducing its impact on people’s perception of other races.
Meissner, C.A., and Brigham, J.C. (2001). “Thirty years of investigating the own-race bias in memory for faces: a meta-analytic review”. Psychology, Public Policy, and Law, Vol. 7, No. 1, pp. 3-35.
Summary: The present article represents a large-scale summary of work undertaken by these two scientists in the sphere of own-race bias implications represented by the quality of face recognition by various individuals, representatives of different ethnic and racial groups in the process of performing different intellectual tasks. The authors have given answers to questions of a systematic approach to studying face recognition from the angle of own-race bias, have found out a direct dependence of results on the racial belonging of respondents and have undertaken a massive theoretical and empirical research on whether the results are generalizable or not. The results achieved in the process of the study enhance understanding of ORB and reveal all its aspects in the process of face recognition under different circumstances.
Michel, C. et al. (2006). “Holistic Processing is Finely Tuned for Faces of One’s Own Race”. Psychological Science, Vol. 17, No. 7, pp. 608-615.
Summary: The present work is devoted to the ORB effect in representatives of two races – Caucasian and Asian ones. The researchers took a holistic approach to the investigation of ORB and achieved results both in the identification of old or newly introduced faces, indicating a strong own-race bias, and in the process of alignment of photos of representatives of the same race or of another race. The respondents were chosen from different groups to ensure diversity of proposed material and proved the initial hypothesis of researchers on the fact of existing ORB effect between races.
Pezdek, K., Blandon-Gitlin, I., and Moore, C. (2003). “Children’s Face Recognition Memory: More Evidence for the Cross-Race Effect”. Journal of Applied Psychology, Vol. 88, No. 4, pp. 760-763.
Summary: The present article is mainly concerned with the issues of face recognition depending on the age of a respondent and the way a child recognizes faces without special training and under the conditions of preliminary training. The researchers did not stop on the sole identification of the presence or absence of ORB in children as compared to adults; they were mainly focused on achieving quantitative results that would enable them to judge whether the tendency changes with people’s getting older or not. Thus, there were two focuses of the study: the overall volume of memorizing and individualizing faces and the level of own-race bias that was evident in the process of the research. Results showed the presence of ORB in people of all ages, however, indicating that the volume of memorizing faces increases with years thus in significantly diminishing the ORB effect.
Slone, A.E., Brigham, J.C., and Meissner, C.A. (2000). “Social and Cognitive Factors Affecting the Own-Race Bias in Whites”. Basic and Applied Social Psychology, 22(2), pp. 71-84.
Summary: the present advanced research was based on a comprehensive study of representatives of a Caucasian race who were questioned on the subject of face recognition of representatives of both their own race and another race (African American). The results, with appropriate consideration of all possible individual differences of respondents, showed a clear own-race bias without any dependence on personal characteristics and supported the idea about a better level of own-race face recognition as compared to other-race faces.
Turk, D. J. et al. (2005). “Can Perceptual Expertise Account for the Own-Race Bias in Face Recognition? A Split-Brain Study”. Cognitive Neuropsychology, 22(7), pp. 877-883.
Summary: The article explores the possible impact of neurological peculiarities of brain functioning in the process of face recognition that may produce the ORB effect. In the process of the experiment, it was proven that the right hemisphere of the human brain takes an active part in the face recognition process and reacts in completely different ways while recognizing the face of a same-race person or another-race person. The activity of the hemisphere was recorded to be at a much higher level when recognizing same-race faces, which implies a new field of study connected with direct biological processes underlying the difference in attitudes towards different races and peculiarities of face recognition based on racial differences.
Wright, D.B. et al. (2003). “Inter-racial Contact and the Own-race Bias for Face Recognition in South Africa and England”. Applied Cognitive Psychology, No. 17, pp. 365-373.
Summary: the researchers conducted an experiment in two universities in the mentioned countries to identify the level of inter-racial contact of the two races (African American and Caucasian) and to investigate the implications of ORB in them. The results showed a strong ORB effect in both races and a stronger inter-racial contact in African Americans as they revealed a much higher level of face recognition of their own nation.
Wright, D.B. et al. (2001). “A Field Study of Own-Race Bias in South Africa and England”. Psychology, Public Policy, and Law, Vol. 7, No. 1, pp. 119-133.
Summary: the present field study was aimed at identifying the level of own-race bias in African Americans and Caucasians. It comprised questioning people in the streets with a request to identify people of their race and another race, and findings achieved in the process of the experiment strongly indicate the ORB effect in both races. However, the influence of a confederate who approached the respondents in the streets was also evident as a result of the research. People who were approached by a confederate of the same race showed much better identification results, thus showing even a stronger impact of ORB on their perception and system of attitudes.