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Anecdotal evidence abounds with respect to the notion that to members of a given ethnic group, those members of different ethnic groups all look alike. The Black poet Langston Hughes, in his last book, &dquo;Misery Is&dquo; (1969) cites as an example of Black misery, &dquo;Misery is when your friends see Harry Belafonte walking down the street and say &dquo;There goes Sidney Poitier.&dquo; The recent Angela Davis trial in California broached the related question of the reliability of White witnesses testifying under oath that they recognized Miss Davis at the site of the crime for which she was accused. In every instance, these White witnesses contended that they could recognize members of the Black race.While considerable research in perceptual psychology (Gibson 1969) indicates that continuous exposure to unfamiliar stimuli results in improvement in recognition performance, recent studies of inter-race recognition appeared to be in conflict with perceptual psychology. The basic question of the effects of experience on &dquo;other-race&dquo; recognitionhas not yet been condlusively answered. Two studies (Seeleman 1940, andMalpass andKravitz 1969) found that both White and Black S's displayed the own-race phenomenon. However, both the Malpass and Kravitz study and a more recent study by Galper (1973) suggest that there is no necessary relationship between reported other-race experience and recognition of members of that particular race. Galper attempts to explain the lack of a consistent relationship between experience and recognition performance in terms of &dquo;functional race membership&dquo; as opposed to objective race membership. She contends that other-race recognition accuracy is enhanced when race membership is salient; e.g., as with White S's enrolled in a Black studies course.Conflicting results between these studies may be a function of several factors. The studies all utilize somewhat different procedures and, for most comparisons, employed samples of only 7-14 S's per group. Perhaps more importantly, the critical variable of other-race experience, as reported by S's through questionnaires, may not have been sufficiently sensitive to actual lifelong experiences. In an attempt to assess more reliably the effects of prior experience on other-race recognition, the present study has utilized S's raised in known geographical locations together with their reported other-race experiences. Sample sizes have been greatly expanded over those reported in the previous studies and, in addition to the standard Black and White ethnic comparisons, two groups of Asian-Americans (Chinese and Japanese) have been included in the present study. Method All S's were college students. The 75 Black S's were attending a university in the Southwest United States. All had been raised in the Southwest (an area virtually devoid of Asian-Americans), throughout their entire lives, had attended school with Whites, had identified specific Whites as friends, and had reported no previous contact with Chinese or Japanese. The 72 White ...

In Study One, a sample of 230 college students were asked to estimate the abuse potential and lethality of commonly used recreational drugs, both licit and illicit. In Study Two, a sample of 103 degreed nurses were asked to estimate the lethality of the same recreational drugs. The findings indicate that the illicit drugs under consideration are perceived as presenting the greatest danger to the user and that dangers attributed to the use of licit recreational drugs are generally minimized. Perception of danger was found to be unaffected by exposure to reported drug education programs. Results are discussed in terms of public health implications.