One of the striking facts learned from the Human Genome Project is that race-specific genes in humans are essentially non-existing (Foster & Sharp, 2004;Hood & Rowen, 2013). In short, any evidence-based answer from genetics to the question of whether human races exist is clear: No. Why then edit a Special Issue on the mechanisms of the other-'race' effect (ORE) in psychology? First, it seems both regrettable and likely that 'race' will continue to exist as a social and psychological construct, at least in the foreseeable future. Even when ill-labelled from today's perspective, the ORE-the difficulty of recognizing faces from a different compared to one's own 'racial' group-represents a robust psychological phenomenon, and one that has been subject to substantial research over more than five decades. Second, because (simply spoken) two broad theoretical accounts for the phenomenon have continued to co-exist in partial isolation, an attempt to integrate these different perspectives seems as timely and important as it is to put research on the ORE into a field-bridging and ultimately interdisciplinary context (see Box 1).Even when we know from a biological perspective that 'race' does not exist, it is still an impactful concept, as it guides people's identities and perceptions. People perceive a person's 'race' within milliseconds, affecting downstream processing and potentially resulting in discriminatory behaviour. For example, research from this Special Issue illustrates that 'race' affects neural processing in the brain; visual strategies of how people look at faces; and how well faces are recognized from memory. Given the impact of 'race' on psychological processing, it is important to understand the mechanisms of why and how 'race' impacts psychological processing.