Recently in your on-line archive I read your column on why white people don’t look more alike, which interested me from multiple angles. The first stems from the experiences of people with Asperger’s syndrome, a neurological disorder which has “face blindness” as one of its symptoms (and which I myself have). Face blindness refers to both difficulty in reading faces and in recognizing people by their faces. In other words, most people look alike to us. It has taken me years of concerted practice to be able to distinguish people by their facial features, and a lot of “Aspies” are never able to do so. I can point out from my own and others’ experience that it is no easier to tell white people apart by nonfacial characteristics than people of other colors. By “nonfacial characteristics” I mean hairstyle and color, skin color, height and body shape, style of dress, places one habitually is found, and all the other things that are so much easier to tell apart than facial features.
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The second point re: white people not looking alike comes from experiments in social psychology. [The writer quotes a social psych text that in turn cites studies suggesting that people of other races seem to look more alike than people of one’s own race.] I’m appending the journal references.
Let’s begin by conceding that conditioning has a lot to do with it. Following up on the cites you helpfully supplied, Jennifer, we learn that most studies show that: (a) whites have an easier time recognizing white people than black people; (b) blacks have an easier time recognizing black people than white people; and (c) blacks and whites have an equally hard time recognizing Japanese people. The near universality of “own-race bias” suggests that the perception of difference has more to do with the observers than the observed–i.e., it’s all in your head, and no one race actually demonstrates more facial uniformity than any other.
