by Brett Stevens on April 28, 2018

Our democratic society preaches diversity because if it does not, its concept of “equality” of humankind will fall apart. However, diversity seems not to work, mostly because it creates many small groups warring against each other in the opposite of a unified civilization.

In addition to all the other forms of alienation produced by diversity, it creates confusion because the “cross-race effect” explains that people differentiate faces within their own race better than in others, meaning that members of other races are all anonymous and indistinguishable:

Caucasian and Asian participants viewed photographs of Caucasian and Asian faces, and made immediate judgments of learning during study. An old/new recognition test replicated the CRE: both groups displayed superior discriminability of own-race faces, relative to other-race faces. Importantly, relative metamnemonic accuracy was also greater for own-race faces, indicating that the accuracy of predictions about face recognition is influenced by race. This result indicates another source of concern when eliciting or evaluating eyewitness identification: people are less accurate in judging whether they will or will not recognize a face when that face is of a different race than they are. This new result suggests that a witnessâ€™s claim of being likely to recognize a suspect from a lineup should be interpreted with caution when the suspect is of a different race than the witness.

Perhaps all of those wrongful convictions of black people back in the 1980s resulted from an inability to distinguish faces, which caused people to rely on other, less specific traits like hands or hairstyle. One wonders how many current convictions based on witness accusations across racial lines are also wrong for this reason.

This shows us the future of the diverse society: people wandering through a crowd, unable to distinguish others from one another, and essentially isolating themselves in an in-group of their own tribe and a few others as a means of avoiding this anonymity.

By that token, much of the “racism” we see out there may have nothing to do with racial dislike, but simple practicality. If other groups appear as an anonymous horde, it may be best to avoid them. That way, the people you do interact with are accountable for their acts, which means that you can expect reasonable treatment from them.

In addition, this indiscriminability of faces will contribute to paranoia: you cannot identify those who wrong you, so they could be anyone in the herd of people around you, laughing at you as they go through their daily lives. The fear of this may be as bad as the reality.

While the cross-race effect (CRE) is not new, an understanding of its importance in politics seems to have eluded our leaders, so perhaps it is something that should enter into more discussions. We are all strangers to one another in diversity.

Tags: anonymity, cross-race effect, discrimination, diversity, isolation

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