217 Social Distance and Misidentification GABRIEL WEIMANN*, GIDEON FISHMAN and ARYE RATTNER Haifa Uniaersity, Haifa, Israel ABSTRACT The present study examines the impact of national and ethnic divisions on misiden- tification. In that respect this study is the first of its kind. The study of misidentification on the national level involves a comparison of Israeli and Canadian samples, while the cross-ethnic aspect of the study relies on a comparison of three ethnic groups within the Israeli sample. The findings from the experimental test of identification ability reveal that national distinction (Canadian-Israeli), as well as the inter-society grouping (Ashkenazic- Sephardic-Arab), affect the amount of both types of errors: nonidentification and false identification. The comparison of the ethnic distance (within society) to the national distance (between societies) suggests that the national distance separating societies is far more powerful as a cause for both types of errors than the ethnic distance separating groups within a society. Few problems pose a greater threat to the principle of justice in democratic societies than wrongful conviction. Yet relatively little attention has been paid to the problem of the conviction of innocents and its causes. Drawing on a study of nearly 500 cases of wrongful convictions in the United States, Huff and his colleagues (1986) found eyewitness misidentification to be the most frequent reason for wrongful con- viction. The question of recognition ability has intrigued both social scientists and legal experts. Many of the studies and experiments that focused on the factors affecting misidentification revealed the impact of race on recognition ability. The main avenue of research, mostly by means of laboratory experiments, has been to investigate whether people identify members of their own race better than members of another race. A careful review of the results of these studies and experiments reveals some con- sistent findings. Two early studies (Cross, Cross and Daly, 1971; Malpass and Kravitz, 1969) indicated a limit to the "own-race" bias; white subjects recognized pic- tures of whites better than pictures of blacks, whereas black subjects recognized pic- tures of whites and blacks at similar rates. Later studies (Brigham and Barkowitz, 1978; Chance, Goldstein and McBride, 1975) indicated that the "own-race" bias exists to about the same degree among both black and white subjects. In their sum- mary of 14 studies of the racial bias in identification, Brigham and Malpass (1985) concluded that, on the average, both blacks and whites recognize faces on their own race better than faces of another race. Similar identification studies have employed, inter alia, Native-American, Chinese-American, and Japanese-American subjects. All of these studies found the rates of false identification to be higher when subjects were asked to identify members of a race other than their own (Luce, 1974; Scott and Foutch, 1974; Brigham and Barkowitz, 1978). Although the findings force the conclusion that race plays a crucial role in deter- mining recognition ability, the reasons for this relationship are quite complex. *All authors contributed equally. Authors wish to acknowledge the important contribution of Rachel Ramraz and Tony Bole. 218 Explanatory factors may be racial attitudes (suggested by Brigham and Berkovitz, 1978), distinctiveness (e.g. characteristic complexion, eye shape and hair texture) and social contact. Thus the idea, "all Chinese look alike," exists for the Occidental because he does not see any distinctive features that discriminate among Chinese. The Occidental lacks social contact with this group and tends to see the members as a monolithic and homogeneous unit. Moreover, the empirical effort in studying the fac- tors affecting the accuracy of personal identification has almost entirely focused on the cross-racial dimension as the sole expression of social distance. No study, to our knowledge, went beyond the racial context to examine other dimensions of social distance such as ethnicity, nationality, gender and other social categories. The present study examines the impact of national and ethnic divisions on misidentification. In this respect the study is the first of its kind. The national dimen- sion involves a comparison of Israeli and Canadian samples, while the ethnic dimen- sion relies on a comparison of three ethnic groups within the Israeli sample. Israel provides an ideal setting for studying questions of both cross-ethnic iden- tification and recognition, and of social distance between ethnic groups. The massive immigration of Jews from all over the world has produced a population with many ethnic origins. However, this population may be broadly classified as being either "Ashkenazic," i.e., of European origin, or "Sephardic," i.e., coming from countries in Asia and North Africa. Israel also has a large Arab minority living alongside these two Jewish ethnic groups. In terms of social structure, the Israeli society is significantly affected by the ethnic factor. The Jewish majority is the country's norm- setter and, understandably, its dominant group. In addition, unavoidable tensions, which are rooted in the history of Arab-Jewish relations in this region, exist between Israel's Jews and Arabs. As a consequence, Israeli Arabs have the status of a minority, which is attended by marginality in regard to almost every aspect of the country's social and political life. But ethnically grounded divisions also exist among Israeli Jews, namely the Sephardic and Ashkenazic groups. Israel's founding fathers were for the most part Ashkenazic Jews, and they established the supremacy of Europeans, i.e, Western, culture in the country. This circumstance made the absorption of the Ashkenazic immigrants to the country relatively easy, but it had the opposite effect with regard to Sephardic immigrants. Historically, Israel's Ashkenazics have, by and large, attained a high social status, whereas Sephardics have tended to occupy a lower status among the Jewish community in Israel (Smooha, 1978). Because of its social and cultural pluralism, Israeli society is a natural laboratory for investigating the effects of ethnic and physiognomic heterogeneity upon the accuracy of cross-ethnic identification. Misidentification is assumed to be a result of the hierarchical division within Israeli society. However, the introduction of the Cana- dian sample raises two interesting theoretical questions: Should the Canadian sample be treated as another rank in the ordinally ranked Israel society (Ashkenazic- Sephardic-Arab) ? If not, does the distance between the Canadian society and the Israeli society cause the Canadians to blur the differences between the sub-populations of Sephardic, Ashkenazic and Arab (i.e., "all Israelis look alike")? The answer depend on whether the Canadian misidentifications of Israelis differ across the three Israeli groups. If the Canadian misidentifications of Israelis are ran- dom (that is, almost equal rates of misidentification when asked to identify an Ashkenazic Jew, a Sephardic Jew or an Israeli Arab) then the Canadians would seem to occupy a socially distant position from the ethnic ranking within the Israeli society. Thus, the degree of misidentification will determine the effects of both ethnic and national social distances and will enable the comparison of these two types of social distance and their inter-relation. .