Why can't many people tell the looks of foreigners?

You can't tell the appearance of an actor at the movies.

When I go abroad, I feel that international students can't distinguish clearly.

When receiving foreign guests, you often can't tell who is who.

? Why on earth is this?

@DrakeXiang answer:

I think the East and the West are different races, so the East and the West are used to recognizing the face of their own race. For example, when watching foreign films, I often argue with people whether an actor has acted in a certain film (but I am blind! )

@ jingjingjing jingjing answer:

I've always had the face blindness of foreigners, but after I went to college, I watched a lot of movies. Now I can tell the familiar faces on the Hollywood red carpet.

I don't care much about faces of yellow people. White people are cured by more and more movies, but black people are still face-blind.

In a film, there was a black man with a similar figure (no big fat man). For more than three months, I couldn't tell who was who.

Answer from a scientific perspective

1. Social psychology perspective

(1) external contact hypothesis (contact hypothesis, Brigham &; Meissner, 1985)

The hypothesis of alien contact holds that the direct cause of good face recognition is more contact. (So bullshit with nouns becomes a tall theory, right? )

This is probably the earliest explanation of the alien effect in academic circles. What do you think is not limited by the development of the times?

(2) Automatic in-group/out-group classification (Levin, 2000).

Levin has done a series of research in this field. His view is that when we see a foreign race, we will ignore its personal information because its racial information is too obvious, while the processing of our own race is mostly personal information. This processing mode goes deep into all aspects of social cognition. To put it more clearly, it is because you label someone as a foreigner and no longer pay attention to his personal information.

2. From the perspective of developmental psychology

Generally speaking, developmental psychology believes that heterogeneous effects are embodied in the process of our perceptual development from birth.

Perceptual narrowing

To understand what perceptual narrowing is, we should first look at how Pascal Liss and others did their experiments. In the experimental research with infants as subjects, because they can't speak and can't understand the experimental tasks like adults, we often adopt the "adaptation" paradigm to carry out such experiments.

The basic principle is to present a face to the baby repeatedly until he/she does not take the initiative to stare at the picture for a period of time, so we say that the baby has formed an adaptation); Pictures.

After that, we presented two faces to the baby at the same time, one was presented before and the other was new. We judge the baby's face recognition ability according to the length of time the baby stares at two pictures. If the baby's gaze interest or gaze time is mainly focused on new and different pictures, it means that the baby can identify or distinguish the two pictures, and the baby's face recognition ability is normal or good.

The results of this paradigm experiment show that the 6-month-old baby's gaze time on new faces and different faces is obviously longer than that on familiar faces, which shows that the 6-month-old baby can recognize faces and monkey faces well. In contrast, it is the experimental result of adults. For faces, adults pay more attention to new faces and different faces than familiar faces, which shows that adults have good face recognition ability. For monkey faces, there is no significant difference in adults' gaze time between new faces and familiar faces, which shows that adults can't recognize the nonhuman faces of monkeys. The above results verify the other effect, that is, adults recognize faces better than non-human faces.