Sydney, Feb 22 (Inditop.com) People are much better at recognising faces of their own racial group than of others. But a new study says that drinking alcohol almost eliminates that recognition bias.
The study led by Kirin Hilliar, Richard Kemp and Tom Denson from University of New South Wales (UNSW) School of Psychology tested about 140 university students of Western European and east-Asian descent. They found that when given enough alcohol to be mildly intoxicated, subjects lost the ability to more easily recognise faces from their own race.
They found that recognition of different-race faces was unaffected by alcohol, yet both groups lost their “own-race bias”. No such change was observed in a control group given a placebo drink.
“Alcohol has a negative effect on people’s memory for information,” says Hilliar. “Our results thus have both practical and theoretical implications.”
“They raise potential concerns for eyewitness accuracy in some conditions, and they shed light on the mechanisms underlying the own-race bias,” adds Hilliar.
“Interestingly, intoxication only had a negative effect on participants’ recognition for same-race face, which was significantly worse when intoxicated than when sober. Yet it had no substantial negative effect on recognition for different-race faces.”
“In the placebo group we found the normal own-race bias: people are better at recognising same-race faces compared to different-race faces. Under alcohol conditions, however, this bias was significantly reduced to the point of it being practically eliminated,” says Hilliar.
The team notes that scientific evidence for the own-race bias is well established and has been found consistently across a variety of racial and age groups, and a variety of recognition tasks. It is, however, unrelated to racism or levels of racial prejudice.
But because it involves recognition it is often raised as an issue when the reliability of identification evidence by a different-race eyewitness is considered in criminal prosecutions.
Many crimes – particularly violent ones – occur when both victims and witnesses are affected by alcohol, says an UNSW release.
The results might be relevant in a criminal case when an intoxicated witness was trying to identify a same-race person.
The findings are reported in Law and Human Behaviour.
