A Study On The Influence Of Social Attitude And Social Classification On Face Recognition

Face is playing an important part as a non-verbal stimulus in human communication. People can gather a lot of information through face, such as identity, gender, race, status, etc. Face recognition as an important function of social life, it not only has biological adaptation value on the survival significance, but also has social intercourse function in the sense of life. It is easy to find that we can remember our Chinese classmates quickly but are hard to keep our Western students in mind. This is called the Other-race effect or Own-race bias. The other-race effect which means that it is easier to identify and recognize faces in the same ethnic group than different ones is a special phenomenon in facial recognition. It has received more and more attention from researchers.Globalization is developing rapidly in our Modern society. There are frequent communications between countries. It is common to communicate with people from other race. People can keep a common mind to people from other race mainly. But there are blind worship and racial discrimination. Then do these attitudes effect people recognize faces of other race? People contact with ones from other race through categorization. If thinking about categorization what will happen? This study in this thesis is used to explore the answer in college students. This thesis contains three parts.Study1, IAT is used to collect the collect students’ implicit social attitudes towards other race. Then subjects perform a task to investigate whether different implicit social attitudes can influence people recognize other race face.Study2, some questionnaires are used to collect subjects’explicit social attitudes towards other race. Then subjects perform a task to investigate whether different explicit social attitudes can influence people recognize other race face.Study3, we try to find the effect of categorization for the Other-race effect through divide the subjects into in-group and out-group. And we also want to know what will change when social attitudes meet social classification.Integrated three research, this paper concluded as follows:1There is a weak accuracy between implicit social attitudes and Other-race effect. Implicit social attitudes towards other race will affect the recognition of their faces.2There is no accuracy between explicit social attitudes and Other-race effect. Implicit social attitudes and explicit social attitudes are segregated.3When consider both social attitudes and categorization, neither implicit nor explicit social attitudes work to the Other-race effect. Main effects of categorization are significant.4Three studies have proved that the Other-race effect is a stable phenomenon. Social Attitude Hypothesis and Categorical Hypothesis can explain the ORE at some extent.