ABSTRACT
Both the folklore of social perception and the laboratory data of social science lend support to the existence of an other-race effect in face recognition memory. “They all look alike to me,” referring to members of groups other than one's own is a widely held belief and one supported by many psychological investigations of the issue. Psychological data regularly show that persons belonging to one group have more difficulty distinguishing among individual faces of another group than distinguishing among faces of their own group. Either a simple count of the outcomes of studies or meta-analysis—more sophisticated statistical reviewing— which estimates the impact of one variable on another by combining outcomes of many studies, show that the other-race recognition effect is quite robust and accounts for a psychologically significant amount of variation in face recognition performance.
