1 They All Look the Same to Me (Unless They’re Angry): From Out-group Homogeneity to Out-group Heterogeneity Joshua M. Ackerman, Jenessa R. Shapiro, Steven L. Neuberg, Douglas T. Kenrick, D. Vaughn Becker, Vladas Griskevicius Arizona State University Jon K. Maner Florida State University Mark Schaller University of British Colombia 3/8/2006 Word Count: 2455 (text) + 40 (notes) = 2495 (total) In Press at Psychological Science Corresponding Author: Joshua Ackerman Department of Psychology Arizona State University Tempe, Arizona 85287-1104 Tel: (480) 965-3326 Fax: (480) 965-8544 E-mail:
[email protected] Keywords: out-group homogeneity, anger, cross-race recognition, evolutionary psychology 2 Abstract People often find it more difficult to distinguish ethnic out-group members as compared to in- group members. A functional approach to social cognition suggests this bias may be eliminated when out-group members display threatening facial expressions. 192 White participants viewed Black and White faces displaying either neutral or angry expressions, and later attempted to identify previously-seen faces. Recognition accuracy for neutral faces replicated the out-group homogeneity bias; but this bias was entirely eliminated for angry Black faces. Indeed, when participants’ cognitive processing capacity was constrained, recognition accuracy for angry Black faces was actually greater than for angry White faces, constituting an out-group heterogeneity bias. 3 People readily confuse individuals from other races and ethnic groups with one another — the “they all look the same to me” phenomenon. This pattern may reflect a more general cognitive bias toward perceiving the membership of other groups as less variable than the membership of one’s own group — the out-group homogeneity bias (Anthony, Copper & Mullen, 1992; Ostrom & Sedikides, 1992).