The Role of Implicit Racial Attitudes and Universal Orientation in Cross-Racial Face Recognition

The other-race effect refers to the common observation that individuals are better at remembering faces of their own race than faces of another race. The relevance of the other-race effect to social interaction between people of different races and eyewitness identification of criminal suspects has spurred much research into uncovering the nature of the asymmetry between recognition of own- and otherrace faces. So far, however, many attempts to consistently demonstrate factors that contribute to the other-race effect have failed. One of the factors that may play a role in the other-race effect, but has yet to be shown to do so empirically, is racial attitudes. Past research attempting to link racial attitudes to cross-race face recognition has mainly used explicit measures of racial attitudes. The goal of the current study was to find out if explicit racial attitudes, implicit racial attitudes, and a personal social outlook of inclusiveness relate to the other-race effect. White participants completed explicit attitudes measures, a measure of inclusiveness, the Bona Fide Pipeline procedure (Fazio, Jackson, Dunton, & Williams, 1995), and a short priming task designed to assess racial attitudes. Explicit racial attitudes were found to relate to the other-race effect in a nonlinear manner. Implicit racial attitudes measured by the Bona Fide pipeline did not relate to the other-race effect, but implicit racial attitudes measured by the short priming task related to cross-race face recognition in a linear manner. Scores from the measure of inclusiveness as a social outlook did not relate to the other-race effect. Implications for research on the other-race effect and the Bona Fide Pipeline procedure are discussed