The Cross-Race Effect: Resistant to Instructions

The cross-race effect (CRE) is the tendency for eyewitnesses to be better at recognizing members of their own race/ethnicity than members of other races/ethnicities. It manifests in terms of both better discrimination (i.e., telling apart previously seen from new targets) and a more conservative response criterion for own-race than for other-race faces. The CRE is quite robust and generally resistant to change. Two studies examined the effectiveness of reducing the CRE with special instructions given prior to retrieval. Although instructions at retrieval did change participants’ response criterion—making them less likely to identify test faces as previously seen—they did not shift their response criterion selectively for other-race faces. The findings indirectly support the importance of encoding processes in producing the CRE. 1. Introduction There are numerous times in our criminal justice system that eyewitness testimony can make the difference between conviction and acquittal. When trials contain eyewitness testimony, jurors rely on it heavily, despite holding some erroneous beliefs about the factors that make eyewitnesses more or less accurate [1]. Because jurors rely on those beliefs in evaluating eyewitness credibility and making trial judgments [1–3], false convictions in eyewitness cases are not uncommon. Indeed, eyewitness misidentifications lead to more wrongful convictions than all other causes combined [4, 5]. One common cause of eyewitness error is the cross-race effect (CRE; also referred to as the own-race bias), which is the tendency to be worse at recognizing individuals from other racial/ethnic groups than one’s own racial/ethnic group [6–8]. The bias is quite robust; it appears in early infancy [9], has been observed in young children [10], and persists into old age [11]. Despite the robustness of the effect, people are not necessarily aware of it; for example, Abshire and Bornstein [12] found that fewer than 50% of mock jurors correctly answered a question about the CRE although Black participants were more knowledgeable than White participants. The reasons underlying the CRE are not clear. There are three leading classes of explanations for the effect, which focus on differential experience, encoding, and retrieval (for review, see [7, 13]). The experience-based explanation, often referred to as the contact hypothesis, emphasizes the differential contact that one has with one’s own versus other races. The contact hypothesis posits that the degree of contact with members of a group (i.e., quantity and quality) dictates a person’s