Other race effects

• The ‘other race’ effect is due to people being less able to accurately recognise people from a different ethnic background to themselves. 


  • Scheck, Neufeld, and Dwyer (2000) looked at 77 mistaken eyewitness identifications finding 35% were white victims witnesses misidentifying black suspects, so eye-witness reliability is questionable. 
• Individuals have weaker sensitivity for ‘other race’ faces making them less sensitive to the unique identities of ‘other race’ individuals. 


  • Brigham, Maass, Snyder, and Spaulding (1982) used cashiers in shops as participants and people of various racial groups entered the shop, they found less recognition for ‘other race’ individuals, so the accuracy for recognition may limit reliability of eye-witnesses.
• Much of the research about the ‘other race’ effect takes place in a laboratory setting with mock witnesses and fake suspects. 


  • There is a lack of ecological validity in the findings for ‘other race’ effect so evidence may not reflect the accuracy of real-life eye-witness identification in real crimes. 
• People have more experience of recognising same race faces than ‘other race’ faces which increases accuracy for same race recognition but decreases other-race accuracy.


  • Hancock and Rhodes (2008) found that higher levels of contact with ‘other race’ groups was associated with a reduction in the ‘other race’ effect and an increased ‘other race’ facial recognition accuracy, so the ‘other race’ effect may not always reduce the reliability of all eye-witnesses.
• DEFINITION

  This is when an eye-witness makes more errors in their recall when attempting to identify a suspect of a different ethnicity to themselves (1).