Choosing Your Words and Pictures Wisely: When Do Individuation Instructions Reduce the Cross-Race Effect? EMILY PICA 1 *, AMYE R. WARREN 1 , DAVID F. ROSS 1 and ANDRE KEHN 2 1 Department of Psychology, the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, Chattanooga, TN, USA 2 Department of Psychology, University of North Dakota, Grand Forks, ND, USA Summary: Recognition accuracy for faces of an individual’s own race typically exceeds recognition accuracy for other-race faces. The categorization–individuation model (Hugenberg, Young, Bernstein, & Sacco, 2010) attributes this cross-race effect to motivation to encode distinctive features of own-race faces but category defining features for other-race faces. Two experiments using different stimuli tested hypotheses generated from this model with both Black and White participants. For White participants, instructions to individuate reduced the cross-race effect in both studies but did not eliminate it in Study 1. Black participants did not exhibit the cross-race effect in either study, but individuation instructions improved both their same-race and other-race sensitivity. The present quality of interracial contact moderated the relationship between instructions and other-race sensitivity for both Black and White participants in Study 1 but not in Study 2. Overall, results provide mixed support for this social categorization model. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. INTRODUCTION The Innocence Project (2014) reports that they have helped exonerate 325 people. Most (72%) of these wrongful convictions were based on faulty eyewitness identification, and the majority (53%) of these involved a White witness misidentifying a Black person. Such errors illustrate the cross-race effect (CRE; also referred to as other-race effect), described by Meissner and Brigham (2001) as the reliable finding that individuals are more accurate in recognizing and identifying faces of their own race versus faces of another race. The CRE appears in infancy and progressively grows stronger through adulthood (e.g., Kelly, Quinn, Slater, Lee, Ge, & Pascalis, 2007) suggesting both that it is related to increasing exposure to same-race faces and that it may prove difficult to overcome. One common explanation for the CRE is known simply as the contact hypothesis, which posits that individuals with greater other-race contact will be more accurate in recogniz- ing other-race faces (e.g., Jackiw, Arbuthnott, Pfiefer, Marcon, & Meissner, 2008; Meissner & Brigham, 2001). Support for the contact hypothesis comes from several stud- ies reporting significant positive correlations between recog- nition accuracy for other-race faces and both the quantity and quality of contact with other-race individuals (e.g., MacLin & Malpass, 2001; Slone, Brigham, & Meissner, 2000.) However, the relationship between contact and accuracy in recognizing other-race faces is fairly weak and inconsistent across studies (Meissner & Brigham, 2001). A different explanation for the CRE known as the categorization–individuation model (CIM) proposes that there are two different ways of processing faces during encoding: categorization and individuation. Categorization requires attending to facial characteristics diagnostic of category membership; individuation requires attending to identity diagnostic facial characteristics. The CIM attributes the CRE to the tendency to selectively attend to identity-diagnostic characteristics among same-race faces but to attend to category-diagnostic features of other-race faces (Hugenberg, Miller, & Claypool, 2007). The CIM further proposes that everyone has the ability to individuate other-race faces, but most people are not utilizing this ability. Greater individuation experience (interracial contact) can trans- late into superior face memory if combined with motivation to individuate faces through instructions (Hugenberg, Young, Bernstein, & Sacco, 2010; Young & Hugenberg, 2012). In a series of studies directly leading to the present research, Hugenberg and colleagues (2007) examined motivational factors that could diminish the CRE in White participants. They hypothesized that instructions to attend to the individual features of cross-race faces would increase individuation thereby leading to improved recognition. In their first study, Hugenberg and colleagues used either standard instructions (control) or individuation instructions explicitly describing the CRE and why it occurs and encour- aged participants to pay close attention to and to individuate faces of a different race. Participants in the control group displayed the typical CRE with greater recognition sensitivity for own than other-race faces, while the CRE was eliminated for participants who received the instructions. Furthermore, general instructions to attend closely to all the faces without explicitly mentioning the CRE were ineffective. Recently, Young and Hugenberg (2012) tested their assumption that interracial contact moderates the effects of the individuation instructions in White participants. Interra- cial contact was measured through an interracial contact and experience scale developed by Hancock and Rhodes (2008) that was altered to assess the history of contact with Blacks. As in their prior studies, specific individuation instructions did reduce the CRE, but more so for participants with higher levels of interracial contact. In their second study, they found that high levels of motivation can overcome lower levels of interracial contact, thus eliminating the CRE. Control partic- ipants, even those with higher interracial contact, still exhib- ited the CRE, leading Young and Hugenberg (2012) to *Correspondence to: Emily Pica, Carleton University, Department of Psychology, 550 Loeb Building, 1125 Colonel By Drive, Ottawa, ON, K1S 5B6, Canada. E-mail: emilypica@cmail.carleton.ca Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Applied Cognitive Psychology, Appl. Cognit. Psychol. 29: 360–368 (2015) Published online 14 February 2015 in Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com) DOI: 10.1002/acp.3112