The Social-Cognitive Origins of the Cross Race Effect

美国的刑事司法系统为目击者的误认付出了巨大的社会代价。 目击者的误认是刑事司法系统中最具破坏性的错误之一，当跨种族进行指认时，发生这种情况的可能性最大。 跨种族识别缺陷，更简单地称为跨种族效应（CRE），是一种对同种族面孔的识别准确率高于跨种族面孔的趋势。 这种效果已经被证明是令人惊讶的强大。 它是面部感知中最容易复制的现象之一，心理学家对此感兴趣已有半个多世纪。 虽然这种现象本身就很有趣，但对综合招聘考试的高度兴趣至少部分是由于错误识别可能造成的毁灭性法律的后果。 鉴于刑事司法系统对目击证人身份的依赖，以及目击证人对陪审团决定的重要性，了解CRE的机制以及如何改善这些影响显然是心理学的重要目标。 本研究将探讨社会分类在多大程度上可以解释CRE。 这项研究表明，CRE可能部分是由于1）倾向于更深入地思考内群体成员而不是外群体成员（导致更好地编码同种族面部特征），以及2）倾向于关注外群体成员面部的不同信息，重点不是什么使面部独特，而是什么使面部与其他面部相似。在9个实验中，本研究将检验这一假设，即复制良好的CRE可能部分是由于社会分类的过程。 这些研究采用社会认知操纵1）内组与外组成员，2）动机，和3）感知的群体独特性，以创建，调节和消除CRE。 最常用的范式来研究CRE是一个相对简单的两阶段编码-识别范式。在时间1，参与者完成编码阶段，在那里他们观察一系列相同种族（SR）和交叉种族（CR）的面孔，一次一个，每个都持续一段固定的时间。在时间2，在一个旨在减少参与者能够在工作记忆中保留先前看到的面孔的可能性的干预填充任务之后，参与者参与识别阶段。在这个识别任务中，参与者看到一系列SR和CR面孔，其中一半是以前见过的，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）以及哪些是“新”面孔（即，时间1看不见）。这里提出的所有研究都将使用该标准程序的变体。 这项研究的结果将有助于了解CRE的原因，从而减少与目击者错误识别相关的问题。

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.