Is Facial Skin Tone Sufficient to Produce a Cross-Racial Identification Effect?

Abstract

Research clearly supports the existence of an other-race effect for human faces whereby own-race faces are more accurately perceived and recognized. Why this occurs remains unclear. A computerized program (Mac-a-Mug Pro™) for face composition was used to create pairs of target and distractor faces that differed only in skin tone. The six target faces were rated on honesty and aggressiveness by 72 university students, with just one ‘Black’ and one ‘White’ face viewed by each student. One week later, they attempted to identify these faces in four lineups: two with target-present and two with target-absent. The order of presentation of targets, lineups, and faces within lineups was varied. Own-race identification was slightly better than cross-racial identification. There was no significant difference in the confidence of responses to own-versus other-race faces. These results indicate that neither morphological variation nor differential confidence is necessary for a cross-racial identification effect.