How come white people don't all look alike? (from 12-Nov-1982)

Cecil's Columns/Staff Reports
1

http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a1_099.html

Greetings. I hope I am not making a faux pas by starting a new thread on an old column. If so, I will blame it on the large amount of codeine I have been given for my cold.

The topic of “why don’t white people look more alike” interested me from multiple angles. The one that strikes me first stems from the experiences of people with Asperger’s Syndrome, a neurological disorder which has “face blindness” as one of its symptoms (and which I myself have). Face blindness refers to both difficulty in reading faces and in recognizing people by their faces. In other words, most people all look alike to us, and it has taken me years of concerted practice to be able distinguish people by their facial features – and a lot of “Aspies” are never able to do so.

In light of the above, I can point out from my own and others’ experiencethat it is in fact no easier to tell white people apart by non-facial characteristics than people of other colors. By non-facial characteristics I mean hair style and color, skin color, height and body shape, style of dress, places one habitually is found, and all the other things that are so much easier to tell apart than facial features.

The second point re white people not looking alike comes from a number of experiments in social psychology. One of the texts I referred to puts the results of these studies more clearly and succinctly than I could, so I will use quotations for the sake of clarity. The text is Social Psychology (Sixth Edition, p. 366) by David G. Myers (no relation). I will append the journal references beneath.

"Perhaps you have noticed: They – the members of any racial group other than your own – even look alike . . . . Experiments by John Brigham, June Chance, Alvin Goldstein, and Roy Malpass in the United States and Hayden Ellis in Scotland reveal that people of other races do in fact seem to look more alike than people of one’s own race (Brigham & Williamson, 1979; Chance &Goldstein, 1981; Ellis, 1981). When White students are shown faces of a few White and a few Black individuals and then asked to pick these individuals out of a photographic lineup, they more accurately recognize the White faces than the Black.

“I am White. When I first read this research I thought, of course: White people are more physically diverse than Blacks. But my reaction was apparently just an illustration of the phenomenon. For, if my reaction were correct, Black people, too, would recognize a White face in a lineup of Whites more readily than a Black face in a lineup of Blacks. But in fact . . . Blacks more easily recognize another Black than they do a White (Bothwell & others, 1989). And Hispanics more readily recognize another Hispanic whom they saw a couple of hours earlier than they do an Anglo (Plaz & Hosch, 1988).”

(Aside: I have also read that people can easily distinguish between people from “other” racial groups if they grew up among them, but I can’t find the journal reference for the study that demonstrated this.)

The references for the D.G. Myers quote are:
Bothwell, R. K., Brigham, J. C., & Malpass, R. S. (1989). Cross-racial identification. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 15, 19-25.

Brigham, J. C. & Williamson, N. L. (1979). Cross-racial recognition and age: When you’re over 60, do they still all look alike? Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 5, 218-222.

Chance, J. E., & Goldstein, A. G… (1981). Depth of processing in response to own- and other-race faces. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 7, 475-480.

Ellis, H. D. (1981). Theoretical aspects of face recognition. In G. H. Davies, H. D. Ellis, & J. Shepherd (Eds.), Perceiving and remembering faces. London, Academic Press.

Platz, S. J., & Hosch, H. M. (1988). Cross-racial/ethnic eyewitnesses identification: A field study. Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 18, 972-984.

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Well, hey, allow me to be the first to say, “Welcome to the SDMB!” That has to be one of the most intelligent debut posts I’ve ever seen, newbie posts around here tending more towards the “hey, Cecil dude, like…whassup?” variety. :smiley:

Stick around. :wink:

[excited whispering in background]

“Hey, guys, she included a link to the column and everything!”
“Maybe it’s a god…”

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Allow me to be the second to welcome you to the Straight Dope Message Board, Jennifer, and to hope you come 'round often, even when you’re NOT zonked from codeine.

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Many thanks for the encouragement to both of you – although you may live to regret it!

One of the advantages of being stuck home under the weather is that one has the time to look things up in books.

Oh, and DDG – I’m only a god(dess) on topics related to autism, Asperger’s Syndrome, H. P. Lovecraft, and Harry Potter. The rest of the time I’m merely a plain old garden variety demi-god.

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I often suffer from what I call “white-guy syndrome” when watching movies, especially spy movies. I’m always nudging my husband and saying “Is that the guy from the beginning, the guy with the pen?” “Is that the guy who was in bed with the dead lady?” I just can’t see the distinctions among guys in suits with short hair.

I’m white. Not autistic as far as I know.

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Does anyone have information revealing how mixed-race individuals perceive the diversity amongst races? I am assuming that they would find whatever race they grew up around the most diverse. The notion that there could be some sort of racial identifying hardwiring present seems hard to support when we are constantly being shown that the minds of all races are alike.

My theory is that people grow how to read the faces of the people around them. In white societies, the most prominent facial difference is hair colour and texture. So whites grow up using this as their way of telling people apart. Now along comes a group of Africans, whose hair is very similar. The face reading method fails, and the people are end up looking the same, despite plenty of other differences. Being Caucasian, I do not want to suggest the methods other races use to read faces. There may be much heavier emphasis on facial features, even their placement or general differences in skin tone.

As an extreme, imagine a hoard of alien invaders whose head vary enormously in shape, from plate to needle shaped and everything in between. This is their predominant way of telling people apart. Now they arrive at earth, and spot three people: a Caucasian blonde, a Native American and a Native Australian. Despite the differences we perceive, they see all three as looking more or less the same because their heads are similar shapes.

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Greetings, all. Sorry to take so long to get back to this.

Carlotta: I can certainly understand your difficulty with telling people apart in movies. To me, actors in US films and TV are the hardest set of people to tell apart, because a tremendous number of them fit a particular “look.” Although the desired look changes over time, it is extremely hard to distinguish between actors of the same era. Of course, there’s also the problem that if you don’t know that a character is important, you may just not bother to pay much attn to how they look.

Insecta: I don’t have any info on how mixed-race persons perceive different racial groups, but I did mention reading a study that determined that people raised among multiple racial groups have no difficulty distinguishing member of those groups. It is only when one is confronted with someone outside of the group(s) one was raised among that telling people apart becomes a problem.

From further studies, it has been determined that there is some kind of instinct to favor people from the group one is raised among as well as to favor people who look like oneself. Essentially a leftover instinct from the millenia where competition for necessities meant each group had to push out other groups to survive, it seems that this instinct can be turned by one’s upbringing into virulent racism. In other words, racism can “feel right” if it is hooked into this instinct early enough.

As with the “fight-or-flight” instinct, it is rather vital to become aware of and deal with the instinct to favor those perceived as one’s own in-group. Just like fight-or-flight can lead to violent outbursts and panic attacks, instinctive in-group favoritism can lead to nasty acts against “out-groups.”

The obvious problem with the in-group favoritism (or any other instinct) is that if one is unaware of it, it feels right, like any instinct. The fact that instincts that have been outdated for millenia can lead to self-destructive behavior is seldom understood by those who feel that gut instinct is always a good guide.

In both in-group favoritism and the “those people all look alike” syndrome, being raised in or frequently exposed to a multi-racial environment counteracts the innate problem. Hence the value of, say, Sesame Street, where children living in an area with little diversity can get used to seeing people of various races as friendly human beings and part of “their crowd.”

Of course, this begs the question: if one were raised seeing only marionette-type puppets, would all Muppets look alike???

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Hopefully this isn’t a hijack, but this strikes me as a special case of many kinds of detail-detection. (Warning: following is a bunch of anecdotal evidence and generalities, with no cites)

For example, music of a certain style all sounds alike to people who don’t listen to much of it – all jazz sounds alike, all classical sounds alike, all rap sounds alike, if you don’t listen to that music. My grandfather used to say that all rock-and-roll was just screaming and drums – it seemed bizarre to me at the time, because it was obviously so varied (to me). The classical music he listened to all sounded the same to me (at the time – I listen to more of it now). All dolphins look alike to me, but not to someone who studies dolphins, same for most other animal species (not dogs and cats as much – because I’ve grown up around them?). Wine is pretty much all the same to me – I drink some wine, but not enough to be a specialist, but to others, each wine has its own distinctive taste, body, etc.

The music and wine examples (may) illustrate that it’s not just a visual detail thing, but affects all of our senses.

I think that if a bunch of aliens came down, they couldn’t tell humans apart from chimps, gorillas, and orangutans, let alone distinguish between one human and the next.

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I think Rittersport is onto comething.

I don’t notice a lot of the variation in other races because I am predominately surrounded by white people and I can rely on the variations I’m used to. Hair color, texture, eye color.

If you dropped me in Seoul tomorrow, and someone asked me to do them a favor and pick up their daughter from pre-school, I’d be at a loss. I’d be looking for someone with straight black hair and dark eyes–and I’d have 20 kids who fit that description. But if I lived there awhile, I am sure I would tune in to the same range of variations there, but by using other details–face shape, complexion, etc.

10

I think Rittersport is basically right, too.

I always thought this phenomenon was based on that you are better able to judge within group differences when exposed to that group more. When living with mostly black (or white, or…) people, it is more important to tell them apart than the occasional person from another race you meet. With them, the only striking thing is that they are unlike the people you usally meet, so you are not very tuned in to the differences among them.

11

Exposure is the correct issue. Although on the issue of variations in races, we have to remember the point Cecil made that boils down to Whites not really being much of a category anymore. For all the White fears of contamination by other races, we’ve always been kinda brown.

Besides, my skin ain’t white…it’s pink. :wink:

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Congrats, Jennifer, Cecil has taken your post as the “question” for his next column, "“Own-Race Bias Revisited”, which will be published tomorrow (Friday May 23)!

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Dear C K D H;

Hot doggies! It is a pretty interesting subject, and one on which there is a surprisingly large amount of research.

So far, the most interesting thing in this discussion for me has been how strongly people reacted to the idea that there might be some innate form of favoritism for one’s own race. Massive numbers of excellent studies in the field of social psychology have shown that humans have an innate tendency towards “in-group bias,” but no one likes to hear that – even though dealing effectly with issues of racism probably would be facilitated by greater understanding of innate bias and its antecedents.

At any rate, I hope Mr. Adams has fun with this one – I did!

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Except that it probably goes back much further than “millenia”; it probably goes back at least to the era when hominids were much more diverse. If you were a baby growing up surrounded by hominids of slightly different species, it was vital to be able to tell the difference between your relatives (who would feed you) and strangers (who would eat you). Some species might have evolved a hard-wired solution (“a face that looks like X is safe”), but then they would have been prevented from evolving larger brains (which changes the face) without reworking the hard-wiring. Our ancestors instead developed the ability to learn what relatives look like, which left them wiggle room to develop large brains.

You can see this in babies today; faces that look different from Mommy & Daddy make them nervous. Faces that look very different make them very nervous. As we grow up, we can learn to overrule these feelings, but they’re still there, and they can blindside us if we try to pretend they aren’t.

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Fans of Japanese anime know that the Japanese themselves recongize that they’ve got a very homogenous set of features – the characters in their anime sport hair colors, hair styles, eye colors, etc., that are rarely seen among Japanese because they know that otherwise they woudn’t be able to tell them apart, especially given that the characters’ facial features are all drawn pretty much alike in most anime.

Japanese people don’t all look alike to me, but any reasonable person is going to have to conclude that they look a lot more alike than people who have more variation in skin color, eye color, hair color, build, etc., such as Americans.

I also understand that the Japanese are kinda weird about their homogeneity, and that men who are missing arms or legs or are otherwise variants from the norm have to resort to life-size “love dolls” for companionship, because no Japanese woman, even a prostitute, will have him. Whereas Americans are generally a lot more relaxed and grown up about such things.

16

I know anecdotal evidence is not the singular form of facts, but let me share my experiences.

I’m a white guy. A white guy who moved to Singapore when I was 15 years old. By the time I came back to the states at 18, I had a MUCH easier time telling apart different Asians than I did caucasions.

17

I think there is an important point being missed here: it isn’t so much a matter of being to more easily recognize one race or another as being able to recognize that which is familiar to you. Because white people tend to hang out with white people and black with black, they are more familiar with the features of their own race that allow them to distinguish.

Here is an example from an entirely different area: my town is surrounded by mountains. When I first moved here they presented a uniform and confusing edifice - I couldn’t easily tell one from another. Now that I’ve hiked through them, they look as different as the faces of my friends do.

18

Hi, barkelybeast!

Actually, the point that the racial group(s) one recognizes most easily are a function of exposure has been made repeatedly here, by RitterSport, CrankyAsAnOldMan, drhess and myself – hope I didn’t leave anyone out here, but the point is that many posters have pointed out that who one is exposed to early in life is likely to have a profound impact on the “they all look alike” syndrome.

My point about innate in-group bias does not contradict the relevance of the exposure factor. My argument is that there seems to be an innate “program” in humans that picks up on the people a child is first surrounded by and labels them as “us” in the child’s mind – as JohnStracke pointed out, a hardwired mental picture of “us” would not be nearly as effective a mechanism as the ability for an infant to favor its immediate family, e.g. the people who provide food and protection.

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Hey All,

I just read Cecil’s response to the question. I think Cecil may have finally made a mistake! The real question should be “How Does facial recognition software work?”, i.e. can it distinguish between faces of all races? If not, then that tells you something, and if it does, then that means something too!

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Cecil doesn’t make mistakes, SandWrier, not ever. Well, hardly ever. Like Wizards, he answers exactly the question he means to answer, neither more nor less.