Races and Faces

I visited http://living.jdewperry.com/ and was immediately drawn into the frequently updated entries that deal with modern events. The article I chose was "Facial recognition and “implicit racial bias”"(http://living.jdewperry.com/2009/03/facial-recognition-and-implicit-racial-bias/#more-1388). I chose this article because of a psychology class I had taken where we talked about this subject. Although we talked about a different study in that class, I think this is an interesting subject that does not get a great deal of attention. The study that he talks about is a study about "individual condition" and "categorization condition", while also using ALPS (“Affective Lexical Priming Score”).

He comes to a couple of conclusions about whether the study was really measuring subconscious racial bias. He suggests that the study might measure a person's ability to differentiate between people of different races. I agree with his conclusions and can see how my own background supports his conclusions. He says some of the factors that might influence their test scores are "their demographic characteristics and life experiences... racial diversity in one’s environment, especially as a child." I am of a mixed race, and I do find it easier to distinguish Asian people and white people than other races. Growing up in my town, there were very little African Americans, a few Native Americans, and practically no Hispanic people. My town was mainly white with a small population of Asians. I first started to experience wide scale diversity in college, and not before then. The other conclusion he comes to is that "tests of “implicit racial bias” may be largely measuring perceptual mechanisms... which are quite distinct from prejudice, subconscious or otherwise." I think the tests are not measuring "implicit racial bias", but how you see people of different races in a categorical sense. If you lack large scale exposure to a certain race, I think it is understandable that you will perceive them differently than other races which you were exposed to more.