Do white people look the same?

Jumpingmedic

Jumpingmedic

Jumpingmedic

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*Mods: move to SC if you think appropriate!*

I chose this title in an attempt to forestall possible attempts to make me seem like Hitler MK II. But just to clarify this has nothing to do with conscious and deliberate rascism, so unbunch your panties and pay attention!


I have the problem, and I believe it to be a fairly common problem, that I find it difficult to tell members of races, other than my own (white/caucasian), apart from each other. I try my best... but it just doesn't happen for me. Famous faces I recognise quickly enough: Morgan Freeman, Jackie Chan etc etc, but for the general population: black guy no1 looks the same as black guy no2 for me. Ditto for asian guy no1.

I certainly wouldn't be surprised if this turned out to have a basis in evolution. It's in a specie's interest to reject and destroy a competing species/race, and preventing the ability to identify individual members of a new species seems to be an ideal way of prejudicing someone against a new species.


What I'm really interested in is people who have been raised by people contrary to their appearance. E.G. a white child who was regularly exposed to black people during their childhood, or even raised by black parents. Do those children find it easier to disinguish other black peoples faces?

I first started thinking about this when I was presented with my cousin as a new born baby. I hate babies, I utterly loathe them and want nothing to do with them. Yet after being forced by my parents to travel to my uncle's for my cousin's christening; as soon as I saw her my whole perspective changed, I wanted to protect her and be a good cousin to her. Just to be clear: THAT'S TOTALLY AGAINST MY NORMAL INSTINCTS.

After that oddly creepy experiance I began to question whether facial recognition was so ingrained that it could actually force you to behave in certain ways to faces that bore some genetic resemblence to you.


And thus I come here. I don't have a large focus group to consult, just an Internet full of normal people, which I guess is as good a screening system as any. Essentially, what I am wondering is: do people of one race learn to differenciate between members of their race better because they were raised by members of that race. Could you breed a child to be able to freely recognise faces of black or white races if they were brought up in an environment that flooded their childhood with both faces?
 
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facial recognitions comes from looking at loads of people as you grow up. I'm sure there must be loads of this on interwebs :)
 
dougguk said:
:confused:
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Oh come on, it's not that hard, he's hardly asking you to comprehend intricate nuclear physics.

The main thrust is, Is racially orientated facial recognition abilities (ie. a lot of white people find it hard to distinguish two black people compared to if they were white) a product of instinct/evolution or merely an upbringing thing, due to not mixing well etc.
 
No, I have the same problem at times.

For example African people I used to really struggle, however now I can tell them apart by their nose/etc. You just need to know what to look for.
 
I think it's just based purely on what you're use to using about a persons physical appearance to identify them.
For example in a caucasian the width of the nose and the thickness of the lips are excellent subconcious markers to differentiate two different people.
However with someone of african descent, their lip thickness and nose width is likely to fall so far outside the range that you're used to, you're unable to use it as a differentiation marker easily.

If you lived in a black community for a year or two, I bet you'd have a lot easier time of it :p
 
I think it might be more to do with what you deem unusual. If someone had a massive scar on their face you might not notice they had a slight squint because you focus on the scar. Similarly it sounds like you don't see a huge amount of people from different races and, as such, when you do see one your mind concentrates on their skin colour rather than something which would help you recognise them from someone else of their race, like the shape of their face or other defining feature. When you see someone of your own race, because their skin colour is not unusual to you, it fades into the background to be overtaken by something that helps you more easily delineate them from others. The brain is very good at throwing away details that it doesn't deem important and concentrating on those that it thinks are. This, I think, may be one of those situations.
 
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I know what you mean and im sure it is pretty easy to be able to recognise differences in people from other races if you are in the company of enough of them for a long enough time?

I've always thought it would be easier for a non - white to tell the differnce between two white people than visa versa however? Maybe due to the facvt that there are more variations (in my eyes) such as hair colour / type?
 
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If i was out shopping and i spotted a face i had looked at a week before in somewhere else i'd reconise him/her from that week before no doubt.

But if i moved to an oriental country i dont think the same could happen if you know what im saying (all oriental people look same/very similar to me)
 
this makes sense, if you haven;t been in contact with a certain race from childhood it does become a bit hard to spot the difference.
 
fini said:
I think it might be more to do with what you deem unusual. If someone had a massive scar on their face you might not notice they had a slight squint because you focus on the scar. Similarly it sounds like you don't see a huge amount of people from different races and, as such, when you do see one your mind concentrates on their skin colour rather than something which would help you recognise them from someone else of their race, like the shape of their face or other defining feature. When you see someone of your own race, because their skin colour is not unusual to you, it fades into the background to be overtaken by something that helps you more easily delineate them from others. The brain is very good at throwing away details that it doesn't deem important and concentrating on those that it thinks are. This, I think, may be one of those situations.
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I think I'll go along with that. To be quite honest I live in a spectaculaly non-black area. I mean lets face it, races tend to congregate in certain areas. So seeing a black person, it's the first thing I notice.

Still I wonder if a white child raised by black parents would have this problem with black faces, or would genetics kick in and make them recognise white faces instead.
 
You have to be preety blind not to work out the one person of one race is the same as another person of the same race.

All you have to do is open your eyes ;)
 
Being non-caucasian, I don't think all of them look alike.

I have also thought about this a bit and my conclusion was that if you spend enough time around a type of people and/or community, you can differentiate them more easily.

Born in Mauritius but now in the UK, I can differentiate caucasians/non-native asians fairly ok. However, I reckon when it comes to native orientals, I would probably struggle more. Native africans/blacks, I think may be a in between. When I went to SE London the first time, a lot of them appeared similar to me.
 
I find it hard to distinguish between different oriental people unless I have seen their face a few times, black people I find slightly less hard and Arabs/central asian people I can usually recognise pretty easily. Not sure why....
 
I believe it is absolutely to do with your exposure to said race.

When your brain learns to classify persons faces it will slowly reject generic information such as skin colour and use subtle features of the face to form its classification.

When you are exposed to someone of a different race (say oriental) your brain will see information that massively conflicts with what it considers "generic" such as skin colour or eye shape. So it automatically concludes it is a different person than anyone you have previously met however it does not have the ability to classify the subtle differences of the new features, over time it can learn this of course.


Hope that makes sense, (you can tell I view the mind and brain from the persepective of someone who studies AI ;p)
 
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