Assignment: differential experience hypothesis

Assignment: differential experience hypothesis

There is now considerable evidence that people are much better at discriminating among faces of their own race or ethnic group than among faces of other races or ethnic groups (Bartol & Bartol, 2004). Researchers call this phenomenon own-race bias (ORB), or it is sometimes referred to as “own-race effect” or “cross-race effect.” Although there are several possible explanations for ORB, the most popular is called the differential experience hypothesis. The hypothesis states that individuals will have greater familiarity or experience with members of their own race and will thus be better able to discern differences among its members. Thoughts/reactions??

‘s early studies focused on a particular aspect of the interaction between costs and benefits experienced by the mother and the father: In her hypothesis that an individual could benefit by increasing effort when mated to an attractive member of the opposite sex because this might enhance the ability to maintain the pair-bond with this mate now or in future breeding attempts (Burley 1986, 1988). The discrepancy between early work that focused on pair-bond maintenance and current much broader definitions is probably a healthy sign of progress in a field. Even so, in this paper, we would like to point out that the field is still plagued by differences between researchers in what they consider DA and in which direction they predict allocation of resources to vary. Particularly, the “compensation hypothesis” has recently been proposed as a mechanism that appears to make opposite predictions to the DA hypothesis, but as