The contribution of face familiarity to ingroup favoritism and stereotyping

Abstract

The familiar face overgeneralization hypothesis holds that an own-race positivity bias is, in part, a perceptual by-product of reactions to familiar people versus unfamiliar-looking strangers. Because prototypical facial structure varies across racial groups and communities are often racially segregated, strangers from one's own racial group should appear more familiar than strangers from a different racial group, contributing to ingroup favoritism and negative outgroup stereotypes. As predicted, the lower familiarity of own- than other-race faces mediated Koreans' and White Americans' ingroup favoritism in Study 1 and Black and White Americans' ingroup favoritism in Study 2. Lower familiarity of other-race faces also mediated negative stereotypes of other-race faces and partially suppressed positive ones, with familiarity effects confined to affectively valenced stereotypes. The results suggest that the unfamiliarity of other-race faces contributes not only to ingroup favoritism but also to a dual-process stereotyping in which both cultural beliefs and negative affective reactions to unfamiliarity make a contribution.