LOOKING AT RACE:

EXPLICIT AND
IMPLICIT MEASURES
OF OWN-RACE BIAS
Elainna Simpson
 Introduction
• What is own race bias?: Humans are better at recognizing faces from their own race than a
different race
• 2 theories
1) Perceptual Expertise: An individual’s perceptual processing has expertise within their own race
2) Sociocognitive: Reduced social interest resulting in shallow processing
• Development
• 3 month infants prefer to look at own-race faces
• ORB occurs at 6 months and more robustly by 9 months
• Experience with other race faces can correct an ORB
• Eye tracking: infants pick up the social norms of their culture for looking at faces
• In-group/out-group categorization
• Own-race faces seen more holistically, other-race faces not
• Children learn to categorize themselves and this can then add to an ORB
• Infants: Perceptual expertise, Adults: sociocognitive
Anzures, Quinn, Pascalis, Slater, & Lee (2013)
Introduction
• Hehman, Mania, & Gaertner (2010)
• Utilize in-group and out-group categorization to understand sociocognitive theory
• Use own-university and other-university with own-race and other-race
• Used white and black faces for the stimuli, but only white participants
• Data did support that university categorization effected ORB (eliminated it)

• Kloth, Shields, & Rhodes (2014)

• Almost Replication of Hehman et. al (2010)
• Instead: hooded faces (eliminate extra memory cues), Asian and European faces for stimuli & as
participants, Australia (less university affiliation/pride)
• Data did not support that university categorization effected ORB (eliminate it)

• Wu, Laeng, & Magnussen (2012)

• Eyetracking and Pupilometry to study ORB through different eye-patterns
• Results: difference in eye movement in encoding between own-race and other race faces, more
active scanning for own-race faces and larger pupil dilation (they associated with less cognitive
effort) for other-race faces
Hypothesis
Our hypothesis is to see if an own-race bias exists in our sample size and then
determine if association to another in-group (university/college) will affect
the memory and attention of own-race and other-race faces. We also hope to
utilize eye tracking to support the sociocognitive theory and analyze eye
movement of participants for own-race and other-race faces.
Methods
• Participants:
• 64 subjects: Loras Students
• Restricted to those who identify their race as black or white.
• Within Subjects Design: Each Participants assigned to both the university and race
condition.
• Procedure
• Demographic Questions
• Learning Paradigm: faces grouped by condition (each condition 4 times; 8 seconds per face)
• Anagram Unscramble (6 mins)
• Recognition Test: “new” or “old” faces (30 old, 30 new; untimed)
• IAT test
• Eye Tracking
• Time on face & Regions of Interest
References
Anzures, G., Quinn, P. C., Pascalis, O., Slater, A. M., & Lee, K. (2013). Development of
own-race biases. Visual Cognition, 21(9-10), 1165–1182.
Hehman, E., Mania, E. W., & Gaertner, S. L. (2010). Where the division lies: Common
ingroup identity moderates the cross-race facial-recognition effect. Journal of
Experimental Social Psychology, 46(2), 445–448.
Kloth, N., Shields, S. E., & Rhodes, G. (2014). On the other side of the fence: Effects
of social categorization and spatial grouping on memory and attention for own-
race and other-race faces. PLoS ONE, 9(9), e105979.
Wu, E. X. W., Laeng, B., & Magnussen, S. (2012). Through the eyes of the own-race
bias: Eye-tracking and pupillometry during face recognition. Social Neuroscience,
7(2), 202–216.