Interracial contexts debilitate same-race face recognition

Social cognitive research has documented the integral role of social categories (e.g., race) in face processing. Activating a social category can lead perception and memory of faces to be biased in a category-consistent direction. The current research extends this past work, to test the hypothesis that making a social category salient can reduce subsequent face recognition. In two experiments, the current research finds that the typically superior same-race recognition is debilitated by making the same-race category salient. We find that when White-Americans self-categorize as ‘White,’ subsequent perceptual and memorial biases reduce the typically strong same-race recognition.