Individuation motivation and face experience can operate jointly to produce the own-race bias

The own-race bias (ORB) is the tendency for perceivers to better recognize own-race than cross-race (CR) faces. Perceptual approaches to understanding this effect suggest that perceivers typically have low levels of processing experience with CR faces, resulting in poor recognition memory. However, social–cognitive models have demonstrated that perceiver motivation can also influence CR recognition accuracy. The current work bridges these two literatures by exploring how participants ’ CR expe-rience might facilitate the ability to recognize CR faces when combined with perceiver motivation. In Experiment 1, we demon-strate that motivation translates into superior CR recognition only for perceivers who have relatively extensive prior experience with individuating CR faces. In Experiment 2, we find that a lack of experience with CR faces can be overcome in situations where perceivers are highly motivated to individuate CR faces. Keywords own-race bias, motivation, interracial contact The own-race bias (ORB) in face memory, or the tendency to more accurately recognize own race (OR) relative to cross-race (CR) faces (e.g., Malpass & Kravitz, 1969), is one of the best-validated biases in face perception. Nevertheless, there is considerable theoretical debate surrounding the cause of the ORB (see Meissner & Brigham, 2001). Most current theories fall into one of two broad camps: experience (or expertise)1 accounts and social–cognitive accounts. According to experi-ence accounts, greater experience processing OR relative to CR faces allows for more efficient encoding of OR faces, resulting in more accurate OR recognition (e.g., Rhodes, Brake, Taylor, & Tan, 1989; Tanaka, Kiefer, & Bukach, 2004). Alter-nately, social–cognitive accounts argue that greater motivation to process the individuating characteristics of OR and CR targets leads to more accurate OR recognition (e.g., Adams