Racial bias colors recognition of angry faces

‘If you are an eyewitness and have implicated a suspect not of the same race as you, are you accurate in recognizing and telling that person apart from others?’ Probably not, CU researcher finds.

In 2006, J.M. Ackerman and several co-authors published a paper in the journal Psychological Science with this provocative title: “They all look the same to me (unless they’re angry): From out-group homogeneity to out-group heterogeneity.” Not surprisingly, the study caused a stir among social psychologists.

The research started with the well-demonstrated “cross-race effect” (CRE)—perceivers typically recognize faces of people in their own racial group more accurately than those of other races. Surprisingly, however, the study concluded that when those faces were black and angry, white perceivers showed enhanced recognition.

Those results drew skepticism from many researchers. One was Jason D. Gwinn, a recent doctoral graduate of the Department of Psychology and Neuroscience at the University of Colorado Boulder.

“The argument was that the ‘angry black guy’ stands out, so (white perceivers) pay more attention,” says Gwinn, now living in Seattle. “But are they remembering that guy better, or just remembering an angry black guy? We were suspicious.”

Gwinn and his colleagues suspected that the earlier study was flawed, in part because the “angry black faces” used were distinctive beyond simply being angry, “appearing weird and more memorable, but not because they were black and angry.”

Others had found the same results as Ackerman, but they generally had used the same facial photos as Ackerman, with the same potential flaws—using faces that were memorable apart from their angry appearance.

So Gwinn and colleagues set up two studies with new facial photos, and with the publication of “Face recognition in the presence of angry expressions: A target-race effect rather than a cross-race effect” in theJournal of Experimental Social Psychology, they contradicted the earlier finding of the Ackerman study.

“We ran the same sort of studies and found that this actually goes in the other direction, toward more error. (White perceivers) remember the black faces even less when they are all angry,” he says.

"The argument was that the ‘angry black guy’ stands out, so (white perceivers) pay more attention. But are they remembering that guy better, or just remembering an angry black guy? We were suspicious.”

In the first study, the researchers exposed a pool of white participants to photos of 32 “target individuals,” featuring white and black faces with a mix of neutral and angry expressions. They were later shown 64 photos, the previous 32 along with 32 new individuals, and asked whether they recognized each face as one they had seen before.

The study found that, “contrary to the earlier findings of Ackerman et al. (2006) and others, participants were particularly poor at recognizing black, angry faces.”

Like most research on the topic, the findings have implications for the criminal justice system, Gwinn says.

He frames the issue this way: “If you are an eyewitness, and have implicated a suspect not of the same race as you, are you accurate in recognizing and telling that person apart from others?”

The second study used the same methodology with a group of black perceivers and, perhaps surprisingly, found the same, though weaker, effect.

“The racial bias cuts across both groups,” Gwinn says. “Even African Americans showed bias, though it was much weaker.”

In other words, like their white counterparts, African-American perceivers also appeared to have a little trouble remembering angry black faces. So what’s going on?

“Given that blacks in America are commonly stereotyped as angry and threatening”—the paper cites research to that effect—“we suspect that our participants were more likely to process black, angry targets in a categorical manner, because of their consistency with the socially shared stereotype,” the authors conclude.

In other words, anger led both white and black perceivers to focus more on the race or the “blackness” of the face, rather than paying attention to the unique features of the face that would distinguish one face from another.

Among African-Americans, this sort of self-directed bias is not uncommon. As an example, Gwinn cites a well-known story told by former presidential candidate Jesse Jackson, an African-American, who said, “There is nothing more painful to me at this stage in my life than to walk down the street and hear footsteps … then turn around and see somebody white and feel relieved.”

Jackson’s implication was that he feels guilty about his relief in being followed by someone who is white rather than black. Since both whites and blacks can stereotype blacks as threatening, both are affected by racial bias, including biased, inaccurate memory for angry black faces, Gwinn observes.

Clay Evans is a free-lance writer in Boulder.