Study helps explain why 'they' all look alike

You might feel pretty uncomfortable admitting it, but "they" -- as in, people of another race -- really might all look alike to you.

Psychologists call this the “other-race effect,” and it’s real. For reasons that aren’t clear, whites generally do have a harder time remembering the faces of blacks, Asians and Hispanics. The opposite might be true as well, but racial minorities haven’t been studied as much as whites.

The "other-race effect" can have serious consequences, notes Heather Lucas, lead author of a recent study about the phenomenon. “Recognizing faces of people we’ve met before is such an important part of everyday life,” she says. “It’s also an important part of our criminal justice system.”

Episodes of “The Good Wife” and “Law & Order” have plumbed this exact topic. So what’s going on here? Do people cast a blind eye toward those who look different?

Kinda, suggests Lucas’s study, published in the journal Frontiers in Human Neuroscience.

Lucas, a doctoral student in psychology at Northwestern University, and her coauthors enlisted the help of 18 female undergraduates, all of whom regarded themselves as white.

The young women were outfitted with caps containing electrodes to measure their brain’s electrical activity through the scalp and then shown headshots of white, black, Hispanic and Asian men. Minutes later, they were tested to see if they could recognize the faces they had just seen.

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Lucas and her collaborators then went back and analyzed brain activity at the time the women first looked at the photos. They wanted to see if it was connected to their ability to remember the faces.  Previous research has shown that folks begin memorizing facial features quicker than the blink of an eye after first seeing it.

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Brain activity increased each time the women looked at a photo, whether or not it depicted a white man. But while photos of white guys consistently kicked their brains into higher gear, the photos of non-white men did so only sometimes. Turns out, those were the images the women were more likely to remember later.

What gives? Are we less capable of recognizing people of other races, or are we simply less likely to try?

That, Lucas says, is still an open question.