I don’t think it’s so much your own race as what you’re used to. Usually the two are one and the same for obvious reasons, but my JROTC instructor, back when he was a young Captain in the USACIDC, did several tours in a row in Korea. He got pretty good at telling the Koreans apart.
When he came back to the States after five years abroad, he found that it took him several months before he was able to tell his fellow white people apart, because he was so used to Korean faces.
The Koreans, by the way, never had any problems recognizing him, because he’s freakishly tall (like 6’3") even by American standards – he towered over all the other white guys in Korea.
I am reminded of a bit from stand up comic Henry Cho, who grew up in Tennessee with parents who grew up in Korea. Basically he first went to Korea as an adult with his father. As soon as he was in the airport in Seoul, he couldn’t pick his father out of the crowd.
I think Cecil covered it pretty well. From personal experience and talking to others, we develop useful little short cuts to tell others apart. We don’t look at each face and examine each individual feature every time we see someone. We look at a set of features that have a lot of variety in the individuals we interact with. Drop us in a group of people were those traits don’t vary as much and they all look alike, no matter how much other traits vary.
I wonder if any studies have been done on kids who go to highly integrated schools. If you are surrounded by multiple members of a wide range of sub groups, how does that change your recognition strategy? Do you do multiple sorts? Or develop a broader set of cues?
First timeI saw him on TV, he did a bit about being a Korean from America. He speaks with a thick Tennessee accent. He talked about how it freaks people out to see someone who looks like him speaking like that. It was funny. (Couldn’t watch that link - video not available).
I think that’s very much true. Humans are great shortcut factories.
Good question. That could help us understand the sorting process better.
My related surmise is about how we define attractive. Our perceptions of attractive features are also driven by what we experience. Now there are some more universal traits - symmetrical features are generally more pleasing than assymmetrical features. Placement of features need to be evenly distributed - that’s why people with narrow-set eyes for their face or big mouths, etc, look goofy. But within those parameters, there are a lot of variations for what we find attractive in a potential mate, as it were.
My personal experience (anecdote alert!), I know my own tastes for judging the beauty of women have broadened as I’ve grown older and become more exposed to a wider variety of women. When I was young, there weren’t a lot of black women I’d find attractive in any sense - they just didn’t have features I found compelling. As I’ve grown older, I have shifted perceptions and now I can appreciate an attractive black woman without expecting her to look like a white woman.
There was a heated thread sometime back (I’m not going to link to it) where a poster asked if there were any beautiful black women. The thread got derailed because people posted pictures, and any that were deemed attractive were not deemed “black enough” (light-skinned, mixed race, etc). I tried to make the point that, on any objective scale, there were plenty of beautiful black women, but the poster was working from his personal subjective perceptions of beauty, and so it is likely that no one would ever find a black woman he would deem beautiful by that standard because his personal scale was filtered along racial traits. I think that comment got lost in the heat.