The work that has shown that Euro-Americans have a harder time distinguishing non-European faces is based on the activity of the fusiform area of the brain. The fusiform area allows the brain to distinguish objects, any objects such as cars, plates, doors, computer screens, and so forth. The researchers used positron emission tomography on subjects wired to a monitor to see when the FFA showed activation. What the experiment showed was that the Euro-American and African American subjects identified non-human objects at the same rate. However when the Euro-Americans were shown pictures of African Americans, and vice versa, the Euro-Americans had a harder time distinguishing African American faces as faces, compared to their ability to identify Euro-American faces. The differences in rates were highly statistically significant. The subjects were students at the Stanford Medical School.
What this means of course is that the activity of the FFA is socially influenced. In fact, the FFA could not have evolved with any ability to distinguish racialized faces. Humans evolved in small groups that rarely traveled more than 40 miles in their life times. Thus selection could have never produced an organ for distinguishing facial differences people would have never seen!! I predict that if the researchers had used Euro-American students from a more “integrated” setting that they would have found no significant difference between groups, or if they had used African Americans from the south side of Chicago, who rarely encounter Euro-Americans, that their responses, i.e. the difficulty, would have been similar to the Euro-American Stanford students.
Now, as for European faces being harder to identify or distinguish, than other "racial’ groups. That simply cannot be true, since Africans are more genetically variable than any other populations on the planet. On the continent of Africa there are large differences in skin hue and hair color. However, the sub-set of Africans who were brought to America were from two areas (West Coast and Mozambique) and also extensively hybridized amongst themselves and with American Indians and Europeans. This process would have tended to smooth out regional differences. In fact, if European Americans were so variable in hair type, eye color, and skin tone, that actually should make individuals easier to distinguish, not harder.
Dr. Joseph L. Graves, Jr.
Professor of Evolutionary Biology
I was an Army officer stationed in Korea about 20 years ago. My job involved supervising the Army criminal law system for a little less than half of the American Army personnel in Korea – sort of like a district attorney. Those of us in the criminal law business found it both amusing and frustrating that when there was a Korean witness to a crime by an American the Korean had a very difficult time in describing – or even recognizing – the American petpetrator. A frequent comment by the Koreans was “All Americans look alike.” And they meant ALL Americans, whether they were Black, White, Brown, or Red.
I think a great deal of it has to do with the amount of exposure a person has to folks of different ethnic backgrounds. I know that until I worked with large numbers of Laotians, I couldn’t tell the difference between the various Asian ethnic groups, since then, I’ve been able to peg them at about a 90% rate.
I work with a brilliant Japanese scientist who has been in the US for at least the last 15 years.
He went back to Japan on a trip a few years back and mentioned that he had a lot of difficulty telling apart the various Japanese scientists he was meeting with…he had to rely heavily on the business cards everyone had with them.
Basically, after such a long time in the US, he had forgotten the cues he used to use to distinguish Japanese people, and had instead come to rely on different cues to distinguish a (mostly European) population. He specifically mentioned different heights, hair color and texture, and eye color as traits he couldn’t rely on in Japan.
I’d like to step out for a moment and welcome JohnNSS and
adelinamz to the forums. I truly hope you stick around and visit the other fora! Your knowledge would be very much appreciated here, and I do believe you would enjoy it.
adelinamz, I am confused. I don’t think Cecil (or anyone else) said that Europeans are harder to identify or distinguish than other racial groups. He did say that other racial groups seem to have as much difficulty distinguishing whites as whites have distinguishing other racial groups, but that’s not the same thing.
The previous column Cecil mentions actually stated that whites have more variation in skin tone, hair color, hair texture, and eye color than other groups, and so are easier to distinguish. Thus Jennifer’s follow up question.
The reply to this question is simple. If the action of the FFA is socially influenced, and in America we live in a segregated society, than all ethnic groups should have a greater difficulty identifying someone from outside of their group than someone inside of their group. The exceptions to this would be subjects like Stanford University African American medical students, who due to their social milieu, as minorities in a majority environment, would see more European-American faces than African American faces on a regular basis.
The segregation index in the US currently is 83% black from non-black, 60% Hispanic from Non-Hispanic, and 50% Asian from non-Asian. This means that one would have to move 83% of the black/non-black population to achieve representative integration in American cities. This index has important influences on our social behavior, since we form the basis of our coalitional allegiances on the basis of familiarity. So, as long as Americans live and work in essentially segregated communities, this will re-enforce racial animosity in our nation.
Dr. Joseph L. Graves, Jr.
Professor of Evolutionary Biology
Just a personal anecdote - I’m a white European-American and about 95% of the people I come into contact with on a daily basis are also white.
Last month I spent a weekend at a shopping mall in an African-American neighborhood doing portrait sketches. This meant sitting in a high-traffic courtyard for 12 hour shifts, drawing and waiting for customers. I’d guess 95% of the people at this mall are African-American.
While at first the mall customers seemed similar, by the end of the weekend a huge variety in appearance was quite obvious. I was really surprised at how quickly it happened.
Throughout my life I have had an easier time identifying “Asians” than do most “white” Americans, although I am technically “white” (depending upon which daffy, arbitrary, and ultimately stupid definition of “race” and “white” one uses). The reason is simple and well-known within our family: When you have a lot of “Asian” relatives, you learn what distinguishes individual “Asians”.