A Model of Generalized Ingroup Recognition Advantage

This award is funded in whole or in part under the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 (Public Law 117-2).

People often have worse recognition memory for individuals who are not (versus are) in their racial group. This well-known cross-race effect can lead to racial disparities. As one example, in the US criminal justice system nearly a third of wrongful convictions that later are overturned were based on errors made in cross-race identification.

The cross-race effect would seem to be specific to faces: A glance at a face quickly reveals information about race, gender, age, and other social categories. Yet many objects beyond a face, or even beyond a person, may signal group membership and cause a recognition bias. This research investigates the possibility that the ingroup recognition advantage exemplified by the cross-race effect is a general recognition bias.

This research has the potential to transform our theoretical understanding of social influences on perception and cognition, including the basic psychological mechanisms that contribute to racial disparities.

This project builds upon research in social psychology, developmental psychology, cognitive neuroscience, and vision science to develop a comprehensive model of ingroup recognition and examine its social impact. The project is organized around three sets of experiments, all using a basic paradigm in which participants complete a learning task followed by a recognition task.

The first set of experiments aims to differentiate two causes of an ingroup recognition advantage: People may better recognize information relevant to their own group because (1) they have more lifetime experiences with their group and thus have perceptual expertise, and/or (2) they are more interested and motivated to attend to their own group. Each cause can be tested with experiments in which participants form new groups and are exposed to objects with which they have no prior experience but are related to their group or another group.

A second set of experiments examines whether an ingroup recognition advantage occurs to the same extent for different groups to which one belongs, and a third set examines how the generalized ingroup recognition advantage can lead to stereotypic judgments of others. Under conditions of tight experimental control, this research tests a novel model that accounts for: (1) the mechanisms and boundary conditions of ingroup recognition; (2) the qualitative nature of the cognitive processes underlying the generalized ingroup recognition advantage; and (3) the implications of the generalized ingroup recognition advantage.

The interdisciplinary and integrative nature of this research has implications that are relevant to social psychologists, policymakers, legal scholars, law enforcement, and the general public, and it can inform interventions to reduce stereotyped judgments. The project also provides specialized training to students at a minority-serving institution (MSI) that ranks highly in terms of diversity, social mobility, and graduation rates.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.