Interesting that you should mention the 'all you __ look alike' issue. As it happens, the reason I remember the rough date of the New Yorker article is that I had a summons for jury duty around the pub date, and was on a panel being questioned for possible service on a robbery case where one of the issues they were checking for was whether a potential juror might believe that a witness of one race was less likely to be able to accurately identify someone of another race than a witness of the same race would. And two days previously, I'd have told the judge that while I was aware of research showing the unreliability of eyewitness identification in general, I had no reason to think that the race of either witness or person allegedly witnessed would affect the degree of said unreliability.
But it wasn't two days earlier, and I'd seen the article, and I had to consider the possibility that indeed, a racial difference might make that ID even less reliable than it would otherwise be.
You raise a fascinating point about the possible implications of people beginning to find all faces somewhat unfamiliar-looking. I wonder, though, whether we wouldn't have some of the role currently filled by (normal people's) facial recognition skills simply occupied by other tools for physical recognition of familiar people? That is, I'm rotten at faces, but in practice a decent amount of the deficit is made up for by the fact that I do recognize people's ways of moving and of occupying space. I've recognized old friends across long stretches of airport concourse from the back on occasion, and I suspect that many other non-face-seeing people have done the same. Surely that would fill a lot of the same social role?
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Date: 2 Dec 2010 10:45 pm (UTC)But it wasn't two days earlier, and I'd seen the article, and I had to consider the possibility that indeed, a racial difference might make that ID even less reliable than it would otherwise be.
You raise a fascinating point about the possible implications of people beginning to find all faces somewhat unfamiliar-looking. I wonder, though, whether we wouldn't have some of the role currently filled by (normal people's) facial recognition skills simply occupied by other tools for physical recognition of familiar people? That is, I'm rotten at faces, but in practice a decent amount of the deficit is made up for by the fact that I do recognize people's ways of moving and of occupying space. I've recognized old friends across long stretches of airport concourse from the back on occasion, and I suspect that many other non-face-seeing people have done the same. Surely that would fill a lot of the same social role?