Cross-Racial Facial Identification: A Social Cognitive Integration

Abstract

A meta-analytic integration of the cross-racialfacial identification effect is reported. The results indicate a significant, weak-to-moderate tendency for individuals to be more accurate in the recognition off aces of in-group members than those of out-group members. There is a trend for this effect to be stronger among White subjects than Black subjects. In addition, predictors exhibited different patterns for Black subjects and White subjects. Specifically, greater depth of processing engaged by experimental instructions in these studies strengthened the effect for White subjects and weakened it for Black subjects. Similarly, the cross-racial facial identification effect increased as a function of the duration of exposure to the target faces for White subjects but decreased as a function of duration of exposure for Black subjects. These results are explained in terms of recent theoretical developments concerning intergroup phenomena, particularly in terms of mechanisms of cognitive representations of in-groups and out-groups.