Date of Award

5-2022

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Arts (MA)

College/School

College of Humanities and Social Sciences

Department/Program

Psychology

Thesis Sponsor/Dissertation Chair/Project Chair

John Paul Wilson

Committee Member

Michael Bixter

Committee Member

Jennifer Yang

Abstract

Multiple factors can influence how accurately people remember the faces of others. Social group membership, and particularly race, is a well-studied influence. People tend to show better memory for racial ingroup faces than racial outgroup faces, a phenomenon known as the Cross Race Effect. Some other work has examined the influence of factors like facial trustworthiness in memory, finding that people may remember untrustworthy faces more accurately than trustworthy faces. The present study examines the joint influence of these two factors in order to determine whether target race moderates this untrustworthiness advantage in memory. White and Black participants encoded an equal amount of trustworthy and untrustworthy White and Black male faces. Although both participant groups accurately remembered ingroup untrustworthy faces better than trustworthy ones, only Black participants showed an untrustworthiness advantage for outgroup faces. Among White participants, this untrustworthiness advantage was limited to ingroup faces. These findings have implications for existing theory on appearance-based influences on face memory.

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