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Yes, they do. Whenever people are a different race from you, it’s a lot harder for you to tell them apart:
People are more accurate at recognizing faces from their own ethnic group than at recognizing faces from other ethnic groups. This other-ethnicity effect (OEE) in recognition may be produced by a deficit in recollective memory for other-ethnicity faces. In a single study, White and Black participants saw White and Black faces presented within several different visual contexts. The participants were then given an old/new recognition task. Old responses were followed by remember—know—guess judgments and context judgments. Own-ethnicity faces were recognized more accurately, were given more remember responses, and produced more accurate context judgments than did other-ethnicity faces. These results are discussed in a dual-process framework, and implications for eyewitness memory are considered.
Source: “Recognition and context memory for faces from own and other ethnic groups: A remember—know investigation” from “Memory & Cognition”
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