The Social-Cognitive Origins of the Cross Race Effect

美国刑事司法系统为目击证人的误认付出了巨大的社会成本。目击证人的错误识别是刑事司法系统中一些最具破坏性的错误，当跨越种族界限进行识别时，发生这种错误的可能性最大。跨种族识别缺陷，更简单地被称为跨种族效应(CRE)，是一种对同一种族面孔的识别精度高于跨种族面孔的趋势。这一效应已被证明是出人意料的强劲。它是面孔知觉中复制得最好的现象之一，半个多世纪以来一直受到心理学家的关注。虽然这一现象本身很有趣，但对CRE的高度关注至少部分是由于错误识别的潜在破坏性法律后果。鉴于刑事司法系统对目击者鉴定的依赖，以及目击者对司法判决的重大影响，理解CRE背后的机制以及如何改善这些影响显然是心理学的重要目标。目前的研究将调查社会分类在多大程度上可以解释CRE。这项研究表明，CRE的部分原因可能是：1)比起组外成员，人们倾向于对组内成员进行更深入的思考(导致对同一种族面孔特征的更好编码)；2)组外成员的面孔倾向于注意不同的信息，关注的不是什么让面孔独一无二，而是什么让面孔与其他面孔相似。通过9个实验，这项研究将检验这一假设，即被很好地复制的CRE可能部分归因于人们熟知的社会分类过程。这些研究使用社会认知操作1)组内与组外成员关系，2)动机，3)感知的组独特性来创建、调节和消除CRE。研究CRE最常用的范式是相对简单的两阶段编码-识别范式。在时间1，参与者完成一个编码阶段，在这个阶段，他们观察一系列相同的种族(SR)和交叉种族(CR)面孔，每次一个，每个面孔持续一段固定的时间。在时间2，在一项旨在降低参与者能够在工作记忆中保留以前见过的面孔的可能性的介入性填充任务之后，参与者进入识别阶段。在这项识别任务中，参与者看到了一系列SR和CR脸，其中一半是以前见过的，另一半是新的。参与者被要求报告哪些面孔是“老”面孔(即，在时间1看到的)，哪些是“新”面孔(即，在时间1看不到)。这里提出的所有研究都将使用这一标准程序的变体。这项研究的发现将有助于理解CRE的原因，从而减少与目击者误认相关的问题。

The Unites States criminal justice system pays a substantial social cost for eyewitness misidentification. Eye-witness misidentifications represent some of the most devastating mistakes in the criminal justice system, and their likelihood of occurrence is greatest when identifications are made across racial lines. The cross-race recognition deficit, known more simply as the Cross-Race Effect (CRE), is a tendency to have better recognition accuracy for same-race faces than for cross-race faces. This effect has been shown to be surprisingly robust. It is one of the best-replicated phenomena in face perception, and has been of interest to psychologists for more than half a century. Although this phenomenon is interesting in its own right, the high degree of interest in the CRE is due, at least in part, to the potentially devastating legal consequences of misidentification. Given the reliance of the criminal justice system on eyewitness identification, and the substantial weight that eyewitnesses have on juridic decisions, understanding the mechanisms underlying the CRE and how to ameliorate these effects are clearly important goals for psychology. The current research will investigate the extent to which social categorization can account for the CRE. This research suggests that the CRE may in part be due to 1) the tendency to think more deeply about in-group members than out-group members (leading to better encoding of same-race face features), and 2) the tendency to pay attention to different information in the faces of out-group members, focusing not on what makes the face unique, but rather on what makes the face similar to other faces. Across 9 experiments, this research will test the hypothesis that the well-replicated CRE may in part be due to well-understood processes of social categorization. These studies employ social cognitive manipulations of 1) in-group vs. out-group membership, 2) motivation, and 3) perceived group distinctiveness to create, modulate, and eliminate the CRE. The most frequently used paradigm to study the CRE is a relatively straightforward two-phase encoding-recognition paradigm. At Time 1, participants complete an encoding phase, where they observe a series of Same Race (SR) and Cross Race (CR) faces, one at a time, each for a fixed period of time. At Time 2, after an intervening filler task designed to reduce the likelihood that participants were able to retain the previously-seen faces in working memory, participants engage in the recognition phase. In this recognition task, participants see a series of SR and CR faces, half of which were seen previously and half of which are new. Participants are asked to report which faces are 'old' faces (i.e., seen at Time 1) and which are 'new' faces (i.e., not seen at Time 1). All studies proposed here will use variants of this standard procedure. Findings from this research will help in understanding the cause of the CRE, and thereby reduce the problems associated with eyewitness misidentification.