Although there is a great deal of research focused on identification issues related to own-versus other-race faces very few experiments have explored whether metacognitive monitoring contributes to the own-race bias. In the current experiment the typical own-race bias paradigm was modified so that type-2 signal detection measures (e.g. Higham and Arnold, 2007a and Higham and Arnold, 2007b) could be used to directly measure metacognitive monitoring at retrieval. A second goal of the experiment was to explore whether self-reported confidence ratings differed depending on whether they were directed at answer accuracy (e.g., judging a face as “studied”) versus at decisions about that answer (e.g., volunteering vs. withholding that answer). Overall the results demonstrated that monitoring does contribute to the own-race bias, in that participants were better at monitoring their memory for own-race faces. Further, there was a significant difference between the two confidence measures, and the pattern of this difference depended on whether responses had been volunteered or withheld.
A standard finding reported in the face identification literature is that individuals tend to be more accurate at recognizing faces from their own ethnicity than from a different ethnicity — an effect that has been referred to by various names, such as the other-race effect, the own-race bias, the own-race effect, the other-ethnicity effect, and the cross-race effect (Bukach et al., 2012, Horry et al., 2010, Meissner and Brigham, 2001, Walker and Hewstone, 2006 and Young et al., 2012).1 Although there is a great deal of research focused on identification issues related to own-versus other-race faces very little of this work has directly explored whether metacognitive monitoring contributes to the own-race bias (Hourihan, Benjamin, & Liu, 2012). Therefore, one of the main goals of the current experiment was to explore whether monitoring ability at retrieval contributes to the own-race bias; that is, whether our monitoring for our memory of other-race faces is worse than our monitoring for own-race faces. The second main goal of the present study focused on separating out confidence for an answer (e.g., confidence that you have not seen a particular face before) versus confidence for a decision (e.g., confidence that you made the right choice not to volunteer that particular response). This distinction in confidence – that is, what some may refer to as metacognition versus meta-metacognition – may be important for understanding and improving performance.
Research on the own-race bias (ORB) has spanned several decades, and the majority of studies support the finding that our ability to discriminate between previously seen and novel faces is significantly better within-group (own-race) than between-group (other-race; see Meissner & Brigham, 2001, for a meta-analytic review). Explanations for the ORB predominantly have been split between incorporating cognitive versus social mechanisms as the main underlying cause for recognition differences between own- and other-race faces (Hourihan et al., 2012, Meissner and Brigham, 2001 and Young et al., 2012). One classic cognitive explanation for the ORB is that we process own- and other-race faces in a qualitatively different manner. For example, some researchers have argued that our expertise with own-race faces leads to configural processing, whereas processing of other-race faces is more “piecemeal” or feature-based; therefore, differences in recognition for own- and other-races faces arise because the configural processing is a more effective encoding strategy than feature-based processing (e.g., Michel et al., 2006 and Rhodes et al., 2009). Conversely, social mechanism theories of the ORB tend to postulate that it is not perceptual processing per se that leads to recognition differences, but rather that such differences arise because we categorize own-race faces as in-group members and other-race faces as out-group members. For instance, classifying own-race faces as in-group leads us to view and process these faces more individually, whereas categorizing other-race faces as out-group members results in homogenizing such faces, and thus to problems with later recognition (e.g., Ge et al., 2009 and Hugenberg et al., 2010). More recently, however, explanations for the ORB have highlighted the importance of both social and cognitive factors, and these “hybrid” accounts are argued to be better equipped at covering the full range of results from the various ORB methodologies (Young et al., 2012).2
