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Your brain prefers to categorize people by race to process information faster.
People are generally more accurate at recognizing faces of their own race, a phenomenon known as the cross-race effect or own-race bias.
The seminal 1969 paper by Malpass and Kravitz appeared in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. The effect is widely attributed to a combination of perceptual expertise and social-cognitive factors, rather than exclusively to 'refined templates'.
Your brain is an efficiency machine that develops blind spots based on your daily social exposure.
Where this comes from
- Study
- Malpass and Kravitz, 1969, Psychonomic Science
- What the check found
- The core psychological effect is well-supported, but the citation provided contains an error, and the claim presents one explanatory theory as the definitive reason.
- Confidence
- Solid, with limits
Related
One of these every day, and every one names the study it came from. When a finding is contested, it says so.