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.