There seems to be many factors besides race that could be the actual cause of this, such as that people of one race are most likely to be around people of the same race, and people's family is from the same race. Having the hypothesis that race is the cause of this implies this is a genetic phenomenon, whereas it seems more likely an environmental one to me.
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There's a fair amount of research that suggests that the FFA (fusiform face area, where we supposedly process faces) is really just specialized for processing objects that we're very familiar with. For example, bird-watchers' FFAs light up more when they're differentiating between birds, and I think they have increased repetition suppression too.
Anyway, the theory behind that research is that we process faces differently because we're all very familiar with them, so it would make a lot of sense if this other-race effect is purely because Western Caucasians see Western Caucasian faces more and East Asians see East Asian faces more.
I'd like to see the study done with people who are living in a country where their race is a tiny minority.
That's a really good point. This may be telling us something more general about what the cerebral cortex is doing, too.
For example, when people learn a new language that involves phonemes very different from those of their native tongue, they often go through a phase where not only do they have difficulty producing the foreign sounds but have difficulty distinguishing sounds that would seem very different to a native speaker. For example, R and L are perceived as very similar to a native japanese speaker and the nasal vowels of french and portuguese are notoriously difficult for english speakers register.
It could be that Wernicke's area (were language is supposedly processed) is really just specialized for processing complex sounds that we are very familiar with. So you'd expect a bird-watcher specialization effect from ... opera goers? safe crackers? sonar operators?
I'd like to see the study done with people who are living in a country where their race is a tiny minority.
You mean like people of East Asian descent in Finland? ;)
I joke, but I'm also making a point. That's valuable if that's what they did, but we don't actually know if that's what they did; we don't know where their subjects grew up, not just their nationality but more importantly their immediate environment. We have no idea. The researchers make no attempt to detail those factors.
Why? Wouldn't somebody with a PhD doing a study on racial anything want to a) know those things and b) tell us about them? a) Yes. b) If and only if it supports their already-formed conclusion.
Scratch my earlier comment. As found in the article:
" The scientific literature has provided clear evidence that the ORE [other race effect] and the popular belief that OR faces all look alike are not accounted for by the paucity of anthropometric variations in OR [other race] faces, but by a genuine lack of expertise. Although this theoretical explanation has been supported by numerous behavioral (for a review, see ref. 2), computational (e.g., refs. 3–5) and neuroimaging (6–15) studies on the ORE... "
so yes, it is because we are used to seeing faces from our own race. And no, the researchers are not implying this is a genetic phenomenon.
There is no implication at all that this is a genetic phenomenon. The research simply states that we are better at recognizing people within our race than outside of our race. From the point of the experiment both genetics and "what we're used to" are equally valid ways of explaining this effect. And neither the article nor the research attempted to put forth either.
I think it would be interesting to repeat the study with people of the same ethnicity but different developmental backgrounds. IE. East Asians that in east Asia and Asian-Americans. Presumably, there is a large developmental component. Anecdotally, my cousins in China have a significantly harder time distinguishing between white people than I do.
>such as that people of one race are most likely to be around people of the same race
Not to mention that that likelyhood can be (much) more so than any individual would prefer:
http://web.mit.edu/rajsingh/www/lab/alife/schelling.html http://ccl.northwestern.edu/netlogo/models/Segregation