Previous studies have found that a person is more likely to recognize a photo of a face as familiar if that person belongs to the same racial group as the one in the picture. But now, a UD graduate student says other "same-group" characteristics influence recognition and can be just as important as racial identification.
That finding earned Eric Hehman, a doctoral student in the Department of Psychology, the Psi Chi/American Psychological Association's Edwin B. Newman Graduate Research Award for his work exploring what characteristics of a person cause others to remember or forget having seen his face before. The research was published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology.
"We found that white students [participating in the research] recognized white faces better than they did black faces," Hehman said. "But when we identified the faces as either University of Delaware students or James Madison University students, the UD students recognized other UD students better than the JMU students, regardless of their race."
Previous such studies indicated that "you can't overcome the racial distinctions" that people make, Hehman said, but his research contradicts that.
Hehman showed UD undergraduates 40 photos of faces — displayed eight at a time on a computer screen — and told them they'd be asked later if they recognized them. After a break, they were shown numerous faces one at a time and asked to identify each as one they had seen before or one that did not seem familiar.
When the photos were grouped by race, that characteristic played a significant role in recognition, but when they were grouped by university affiliation, that affiliation became key. Hehman said the psychological mechanism that causes differences in whether a face is recognized is unknown, but he suspects that people remember those who belong to their own group because those people seem more likely to affect or interact with them