The effects of in-group/out-group categorization on face recognition:

The effects of in-group/out-group categorization on face recognition:
Research Skills 2 resit lab-report.
The effects of in-group/out-group categorisation on face recognition:
Introduction:
Your task is to write a complete lab-report based on the study described below. To write the introduction and discussion, you will need to conduct some independent research on the topic, starting with the references supplied here. The material supplied in this handout provides you with sufficient detail for you to be able to write the methods and procedure sections of the report. You will need the raw data and the statistical analyses that were performed on them: these are available in two SPSS files on the RS2 Study Direct site, RS2-resit-lab.sav and RS2-resit-lab.spo.

Background to the study:
The “other-race” effect, or “own-race bias”, is a well-established phenomenon in research on eyewitness performance. People are generally better at recognising faces of their own race than faces of other races: faces of another race all tend to look the same (Meissner and Brigham, 2001). Thus white people find it hard to recognise black people, and vice versa (although research suggests that the own-race bias is most pronounced for white participants trying to recognise other racial groups).
Two explanations have been proposed to explain why these own-race biases exist. One (e.g. Valentine, 1991) suggests they arise from early perceptual learning: early experience with own-race faces fine-tunes the visual system, so that it is most adept at encoding and storing faces in terms of the dimensions that are most appropriate for that particular race. The other explanation is in terms of in-group/out-group categorisation (e.g. Sporer, 2001): when we see a face, we first decide whether it belongs to the same group as us, or to a different group. This affects the subsequent processing of that face. Own-race faces belong to the same group as us, and so we process them deeply, in a way that emphasises their individuality. Other-race faces are simply categorised as “out-group” (e.g. “black” or “Chinese”), and processed in a more superficial way, with no attempt to individuate them.
There is evidence to support both of these theories, but Bernstein, Young and Hugenberg (2007)performed experiments that apparently favour the latter explanation. Their basic technique was as follows. Student participants were shown a set of photographs of faces and asked to remember them. The participants were led to believe that half of these faces belonged to students from their own university, and half of them were students from a rival university. (In fact, none of the faces came from either university: they were simply randomly allocated to these two conditions. Therefore, all faces should have been equally memorable). The participants remembered faces better if they thought that the faces belonged to students from their own university (i.e. if they were believed to be “in-group” faces) than if they thought they were from a rival university. (i.e. if they were believed to be “out-group” faces). In other words, group categorisation seemed to affect the memorability of the faces.
Our experiment:
We used a similar technique to Bernstein et al’s to investigate whether in-group/out-group categorisation can affect the size of the own-race effect. Caucasian students saw three sets of faces: one set of Caucasian faces (i.e. own-race faces) and two sets of Chinese faces (i.e. other-race faces). For the two sets of Chinese faces, participants were led to believe that one set were “foreigners” and the other set were “Brighton Chinese” – in other words, we tried to make one group more “out-group” than the other. Did this manipulation affect the size of the own-race bias?
We thus had three conditions:
(a) own-race faces: ten faces similar in age and ethnicity to the participants themselves.
(b) “High out-group” Chinese faces: participants saw a set of ten Chinese faces and were told that these were foreign students who had recently arrived in the U.K.
(c) “Low out-group’ Chinese faces: participants saw a set of ten Chinese faces and were told that these belonged to students who were born and raised in Brighton, and who were only ethnically Chinese.
In fact, all of the faces in conditions (b) and (c)wereimages of young Chinese men (aged 18-25) obtained from a Hong Kong face database, and accessed via the internet. They were randomly allocated to be “high out-group” or “low out-group”, and this random allocation was different for each participant.

The following details will be required in order for you to write a lab-report on this study. You will need to re-order them into the appropriate sections of the report, and you will need to re-write them in your own words.

Stimulus photographs:
Each picture showed the face only, in a full-face pose with a neutral expression, on a white background. Each picture measured 10 cm high by 5 cm wide. The faces were displayed using a computer program called “Eprime 2″.

Participants :
30 Caucasian female Sussex Psychology undergraduates, aged 19-30.

Procedure:
The experiment was in two phases. Phase one was a learning phase. Before this started, the experimenter explained to the participants that they would see own-race and other-race faces, and that amongst the other-race faces, half were foreign students and half were Brighton residents whose familiies have been here for at least two generations.
All participants then saw the 30 faces, each one for 30 seconds, and were asked to rememberas many of them as possible. Ten of the Chinese faces were accompanied by the label “foreign student” underneath the photograph(i.e. these were the “high out-group” faces) and ten were accompanied by the label “Brighton resident” (these were the “low out-group” faces). The ten own-race faces were also labelled “Brighton resident”.
Phase two was the test phase. There were 60 trials. On each trial, a face was presented and the participant had to decide, as quickly but as accurately as possible, whether or not it was one they had seen before in phase 1. If they thought they had seen the face before, they pressed “S” on the keyboard. If they thought the face was one they had never seen before, they pressed “L”. The computer program presented the 60 faces in a different random order for each participant, and for each trial it recorded the participant’s decision time (in milliseconds) and whether or not the participant was correct. We will analyse only the accuracy data here.
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