IN VS. OUT-GROUP RECOGNITION

Abstract

The Cross-race Effect or the Own Race Bias is the idea that one can recognize people of one's racial group much quicker than people of different racial groups. This idea is also described as the “ingroup advantage” as people like to identify themselves with people who share similar qualities of race, age, gender, religion, or geography. Outgroup on the other hand is when people are unable to identify themselves in a group. The fusiform gyrus is the brain tissue that activates upon looking at a person's face. Cognition is all the mental activities associated with thinking, knowing, remembering, and communicating. The memory process includes encoding, storing, and retrieving information. Perception is the mental process of organizing sensory input into meaningful patterns. Concepts are mental groupings of similar objects, events, ideas, or people. A prototype is what we perceive to be the best example of a concept. In this experiment, the question that was examined was, how great is the effect of group bias present with students in different schools compared to their own? To conduct this experiment, a group of college students from different universities were used to portray the effect of their own group bias. I hypothesized that the students would be able to recognize students from their schools better than the students from different schools, and the results supported my hypothesis.