Cross-Racial Facial Identification: Black and White Oriented Elaborative Processing

The present study was conducted to affect the own-race bias effect in facial recognition by using an elaboration process. According to method, 45 Black and 45 White college male and female participants completed the experiment. Participants were presented Black and White faces on a screen. Each face was rated using 1)Black-Oriented instructions which focused on features such as eye size, nose width, and lips, 2)White- Oriented instructions which focused on eye color, hair color, and hair texture, 3) Attitude- Oriented instructions which focused on intelligence, friendliness, and honesty. The primary dependent variable was a measure of discriminability using proportion of hits and false alarms, d'. An analysis of variance performed on the d' scores failed to support the hypothesis that the instructions manipulation would affect recognition, although there was a trend for greater discriminability in the Attitude-Oriented group. However, instruction did interact with stimulus race with better recognition of White faces for the Attitude- Oriented and Black-Oriented groups. Also, both races better recognized White faces. Finally, there was no relationship between the amount of other group contact and discriminability.