The Social-Cognitive Origins of the Cross Race Effect

跨种族效应的社会认知起源

• 批准号: 0642525
• 负责人: Kurt Hugenberg
• 金额: $ 18.28万
• 依托单位: Miami University
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2007
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2007-02-15 至 2011-01-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=0642525&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Social; Cognitive; Origins; Cross; Race

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.

美国刑事司法系统为目击者的错误指认付出了巨大的社会代价。目击者的错误指认是刑事司法系统中最具破坏性的错误之一，当跨种族指认时，这种错误发生的可能性最大。跨种族识别缺陷，更简单地称为跨种族效应（cross-race Effect，简称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。这一效应已被证明是惊人的强大。这是人脸感知中最容易被复制的现象之一，半个多世纪以来，心理学家一直对此感兴趣。尽管这一现象本身就很有趣，但人们对CRE的高度兴趣，至少在一定程度上是由于错误识别可能带来的毁灭性法律后果。鉴于刑事司法系统对目击证人鉴定的依赖，以及目击证人对司法判决的重要影响，理解目击证人的潜在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)群体内成员比群体外成员更倾向于深入思考群体内成员（导致更好地编码同种族的面部特征）；2)群体外成员更倾向于关注面孔中的不同信息，不是关注面孔的独特之处，而是关注面孔与其他面孔的相似之处。通过9个实验，本研究将验证一个假设，即良好复制的CRE可能部分归因于良好理解的社会分类过程。这些研究采用社会认知操作(1)群体内与群体外成员关系，2)动机，以及3)感知群体独特性来产生、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1，参与者完成了一个编码阶段，在这个阶段，他们观察了一系列相同比赛（SR）和交叉比赛（CR）的面孔，每次一个，每次固定一段时间。在时间2，经过一个旨在降低参与者在工作记忆中保留之前见过的面孔的可能性的填充任务后，参与者进入识别阶段。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中看到的面孔），哪些是“新”面孔（即在时间1中没有看到的面孔）。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理解CRE的原因，从而减少与目击者错误识别相关的问题。