"All them <other race> people look alike!"

A study suggests that the sentiment crudely expressed in my subject line here is more than just redneck ignorance. The study indicates that our brains do very poorly at distinguishing between faces of people who are a different race than we are, and pins down a specific brain activity indicator of this.

These results show that N170, the highly-specific facial recognition signal, cannot discriminate between "other race" faces. This inability had not been known previously, and this study is the first to identify a possible neurophysiological basis of the other race effect.

They're all human to me.

Ignoring the irony of this being posted by someone named *Legion*
...

Dirt wrote:

They're all human to me.

Pretty much this. I thought it was well-established that humans only have good fine-grained differentiation when they are intimately familiar with certain traits and likenesses. There's no difference between meeting someone for the first time and getting them confused with another similar looking person soon afterward and not being able to tell the difference between people of an ethnic group you are not used to seeing. Similarly with animals. I can tell the difference between cats very easily because i've always been around them.... dogs i'm not so good with - they're just dogs to me (obviously excepting different species). Horses are even worse.

Twenty-four subjects participated in the study; half were of East Asian descent, the other half were Western Caucasian.

Hmm...maybe East Asians and Western Caucasians are just really bad at cross-racial identification.

What I'd really like to see is if this is race or even *ethnicity*: like get 12 Western Caucasians and then get 12 Guidos and see if people can tell the Growing Up Gotti clan from the Jersey Shore housemates.

You might as well preemptively move this into P&C, 'cause it is going to end up there.

About the article though, I wonder if they tested any asian children adopted by "white" families, to eliminate the possiblity of simply being that Asians are probably more likely to see asians much more often than caucasians are, and the other way around. The ability for people to live almost completely within their small community never fails to impress me.

Also I noted the difference in phrasing of the two groups, the one group was of a "descent" while the other group is noted as being from the group.

Nosferatu wrote:

About the article though, I wonder if they tested any asian children adopted by "white" families, to eliminate the possiblity of simply being that Asians are probably more likely to see asians much more often than caucasians are, and the other way around.

I wondered about the same.

Jonman wrote:
Nosferatu wrote:

About the article though, I wonder if they tested any asian children adopted by "white" families, to eliminate the possiblity of simply being that Asians are probably more likely to see asians much more often than caucasians are, and the other way around.

I wondered about the same.

Yeah, doesn't seem like they eliminated the nature vs nurture angle.

LeapingGnome wrote:
Jonman wrote:
Nosferatu wrote:

About the article though, I wonder if they tested any asian children adopted by "white" families, to eliminate the possiblity of simply being that Asians are probably more likely to see asians much more often than caucasians are, and the other way around.

I wondered about the same.

Yeah, doesn't seem like they eliminated the nature vs nurture angle.

I grew up in a predominantly latino-black neighborhood and I never had any trouble distinguishing between Chinese, Korean, and Japanese faces. Although I do think Puerto Ricans and Dominicans look alike.

Edit: I forgot to say I'm Asian

Nosferatu wrote:

About the article though, I wonder if they tested any asian children adopted by "white" families, to eliminate the possiblity of simply being that Asians are probably more likely to see asians much more often than caucasians are, and the other way around. The ability for people to live almost completely within their small community never fails to impress me.

I'd be curious to read a more in depth synopsis (I'm aware of the weirdness of that request) of the study itself, to see if they mention their ideas on that. Although personal experience tells me that it would be largely irrelevant. There's plenty of evolutionary reasons why it's easier to discriminate between faces similar to your own than those different.

The study is really just explaining what people even moderately honest with themselves knew anyway, but it's good to see there's a neurological reason for it.

These articles about studies rarely summarize the studies well.

I read another study - can't find the link now - about how people from different cultures perceive faces. They used eye tracking to determine where people fixated when looking at a face.

The two findings that stood out: Caucasians tend to examine the triangle created by the eyes and mouth, using the full set of features in aggregate. Asians focused more closely on the nose and mouth region and the details of those two elements.

This, in lieu of being frequently mistaken for another black person in town who looks nothing like me.

I am Asian and I have a hell of a time trying to distinguish different types of Asians from each other.

It wasn't that people couldn't tell people of other elasticities apart, it was that they don't recognize someone they've seen before. Their brains treated two images of the same person (with a different facial expression in each) as two different people, unless the person in question was of their own ethnicity.

Quintin_Stone wrote:

These articles about studies rarely summarize the studies well.

You know, we could read the original:
http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2010/10/27/1005751107.full.pdf+html

And by we I mean all of you, because I'm busy working on something else tonight...

I think that everyone who isn't me looks alike. They all look like moving targets.

I can't tell Jews from Caucasians. It's true! Strangely, I can tell between Africans and African Americans.

It's an adaptation for social animals such as ourselves. Our communities tend to share similar backgrounds and habitats... in other words, historically we have looked quite a lot like everyone else around us. We had a pressing need to know who those people were since we relied on them for survival and they, us. Anyone who looked substantially different was an outside, an "other," and a threat. All we needed to know was that they were not a member of our community.

Call that ingrained racism if you want. I don't think there's a value judgment involved, though. We saw others as potential threats, not as inferior. It's also no excuse not to try to overcome it, seeing as we don't exactly live in localized tribes anymore.

Nosferatu wrote:

You might as well preemptively move this into P&C, 'cause it is going to end up there.

I don't know. 'People can't tell apart those of groups they're not very familiar with' should be as controversial as it is surprising. Which is to say, it isn't.

Dirt wrote:

They're all human to me.

Missing the point. The point is interesting (if incomplete) pop-science.

Duoae wrote:

There's no difference between meeting someone for the first time and getting them confused with another similar looking person soon afterward and not being able to tell the difference between people of an ethnic group you are not used to seeing.

Are you saying that there's "no difference" from a perspective of scientific understanding, or just simply because you think it's the same thing? Is the brain activity of what you describe truly exactly the same? The summary of the story seems to suggest there's something unique to the findings, though as has been pointed out, summaries of scientific studies are notoriously bad (and the link to the original study is 404'ing now)

Nosferatu wrote:

You might as well preemptively move this into P&C, 'cause it is going to end up there.

Why? The real study link is dead right now but I'm pretty sure it doesn't say, "whites don't recognize members of other races because those people are all inferior."

Dirt wrote:

They're all human to me.

Except Zombies, AMIRIGHT? They all look alike!

MrDeVil909 wrote:
Nosferatu wrote:

You might as well preemptively move this into P&C, 'cause it is going to end up there.

I don't know. 'People can't tell apart those of groups they're not very familiar with' should be as controversial as it is surprising. Which is to say, it isn't.

That's not necessarily what it's about though. The article doesn't give us any information about how familiar or not the groups are with the other, it just tells us half are Western Caucasian and half are East Asian.

edit: original link is working again, and it doesn't give any info I can see for the WC, but for the EA it says: "All EA participants were Chinese who had been in the country less than 1 mo and had never previously been in contact with a Western society."

*Legion* wrote:
Nosferatu wrote:

You might as well preemptively move this into P&C, 'cause it is going to end up there.

Why? The real study link is dead right now but I'm pretty sure it doesn't say, "whites don't recognize members of other races because those people are all inferior."

Right, but it does bring up the issue of different races perceiving the world differently. Race is supposedly a superficial characteristic of mere physical appearance; if people have an easier time recognizing faces from their own race than faces from ORs and it can't be explained away by nurture-based ideas like familiarity, that means race determines not just our superficial physical appearance, it determines our ability to recognize other humans.

I guess you could say it would mean race might not determine the content of our character, but it does determine something beyond just the color of our skin--that's the controversial issue here.

*Legion* wrote:
Nosferatu wrote:

You might as well preemptively move this into P&C, 'cause it is going to end up there.

Why? The real study link is dead right now but I'm pretty sure it doesn't say, "whites don't recognize members of other races because those people are all inferior."

...well yeah, but it's what we were all thinking.

/KIDDING

First, this study took into account 24 people. Second, there is a correlation / causation problem.

I would say the probable cause is that people have a hard time distinguishing facial features outside what they normally encounter. Because ethnic groups are often isolated, a person's facial features are often similar to those they observe. Does this mean that people have a hard time distinguishing between people with facial features different from their own? Not necessarily. They may be correlated because they are both correlated to the true cause, your surroundings.

As others have pointed out, take a person who lives in a mixed race environment and compare them to someone who lives in a less diverse environment and compare their brain patterns.

*Legion* wrote:
Nosferatu wrote:

You might as well preemptively move this into P&C, 'cause it is going to end up there.

Why? The real study link is dead right now but I'm pretty sure it doesn't say, "whites don't recognize members of other races because those people are all inferior."

Yes, Yes, I know you have lots of friends who are , right?

I know nobody has said it yet (er wait, you just did), but at some point this thread is probably getting on the train to Cleveland.

Anyhow:

Methods
Participants. Twenty-four right handed subjects took part in the experiment:
12 East Asians (six female), with an age range of 18–33 and amean age of 25,
and 12 Western Caucasian (six female), with an age range of 19–31 and
a mean age of 23. All EA participants were Chinese who had been in the
country for less than 1 mo and had previously never been in contact with
a Western society.
All participants provided written informed consent and
had normal or corrected-to-normal vision. The ethical committee of the
Faculty of Information and Mathematical Sciences at the University of
Glasgow approved the experiments.
PandaEskimo wrote:

First, this study took into account 24 people. Second, there is a correlation / causation problem.

I would say the probable cause is that people have a hard time distinguishing facial features outside what they normally encounter. Because ethnic groups are often isolated, a person's facial features are often similar to those they observe. Does this mean that people have a hard time distinguishing between people with facial features different from their own? Not necessarily. They may be correlated because they are both correlated to the true cause, your surroundings.

As others have pointed out, take a person who lives in a mixed race environment and compare them to someone who lives in a less diverse environment and compare their brain patterns.

Which is why I wondered about asians adopted here in the US, racially East Asian, culture/familiarity is with Caucasians, I also think it might go with people raised abroad in a foreign nation since childhood.

Yeah, Nos, I was including you in the "As others have pointed out, ..."

I feel like instead of learning about rocks and chemistry equations, high-school science needs to teach people how causation and correlation work and how simple probability, etc work. They are much more useful, and fairly basic, skills that you need in the world.

Dawkins cites a study in one of his books that measured in-racial group variation of something like 40 measurable indicators like eye eccentricity and nose width. They found that Japanese people did vary less than Caucasian people. But you can probably see the reason - Caucasian is not a very homogeneous racial group (but neither is "Asian" in the truest sense if you include Indonesians, Indians, Malays, Siberians, Aleuts etc.). We are happy to lump Celts, Nordics, Germans, Italians all together in one racial group. It's all very arbitrary.

Race is not a well-defined term zoologically. When does a race become a species? If The Doctor went back in time in the TARDIS in 1,000 year steps and each time took a person of (initially human, but later someone who is an ancestor of humans) stock back with him, they would be able to mate with the locals 1000 years before. It's easy to see he could keep doing this as long as life has existed. Species is only a useful term relative to something else.

I don`t think there`s anything controversial about our inability to easily recognizing faces of people from different racial group. It doesnt mean you think they`re inferior, it`s just that your brain more easily navigates the features of those who look more like you.
From my own experience, I think the nurturing is a rather important factor here. I`m from Latvia, country with quite monotonous racial background. And I had quite a trouble distinguishing blacks and asians, however, when I had lived for 4 years in Geneva, in predominantly arabic neighbourhood, I started distinguishing arab people easily after a year. I still have trouble with blacks but I suspect that it`d be the other way, if I had lived in a neighbourhood dominated by black people.
I guess my brain just adapted in navigating those "alien" features and relatively quickly too.