Covertly instructing participants to focus of diagnostic features reduces the own-ethnicity bias in face recognition

Hills, P J and Estudillo, Alejandro (2021) Covertly instructing participants to focus of diagnostic features reduces the own-ethnicity bias in face recognition.

One theory of own-ethnicity bias in face recognition is that people do not pay attention to the most diagnostically discriminating features of other-ethnicity faces, leading to poorer encoding and subsequent recognition of them. To test this theory, two standard old/new recognition paradigms were employed in which White and Black participants were covertly told to encode features that were diagnostic for discriminating between White or Black faces during the learning phase. These instructions were to rate the size of one of the more diagnostically important features: specifically, the eyes or the nose. The results indicate that this instruction was sufficient to minimise the own-ethnicity bias in face recognition offering further support to the aforementioned theory.