The India Face Set: International and Cultural Boundaries Impact Face Impressions and Perceptions of Category Membership

Abstract

This paper serves three specific goals. First, it reports the development of an Indian Asian face set, to serve as a free resource for psychological research. Second, it examines whether the use of pre-tested U.S.-specific norms for stimulus selection or weighting may introduce experimental confounds in studies involving non-U.S. face stimuli and/or non-U.S. participants. Specifically, it examines whether subjective impressions of the face stimuli are culturally dependent, and the extent to which these impressions reflect social stereotypes and ingroup favoritism. Third, the paper investigates whether differences in face familiarity impact accuracy in identifying face ethnicity. To this end, face images drawn from volunteers in India as well as a subset of Caucasian face images from the Chicago Face Database were presented to Indian and U.S. participants, and rated on a range of measures, such as perceived attractiveness, warmth, and social status. Results show significant differences in the overall valence of ratings of ingroup and outgroup faces. In addition, the impression ratings show minor differentiation along two basic stereotype dimensions, competence and trustworthiness, but not warmth. We also find participants to show significantly greater accuracy in correctly identifying the ethnicity of ingroup faces, relative to outgroup faces. This effect is found to be mediated by ingroup-outgroup differences in perceived group typicality of the target faces. Implications for research on intergroup relations in a cross-cultural context are discussed.

Shifting Our Awareness, Taking Back Tags: Temporal Changes in Computer Vision Services’ Social Behaviors

“…Recently, two new datasets have been released by the Chicago Face Database team, depicting i) multiracial and ii) Indian individuals in the same manner as the original dataset. The Multiracial dataset depicts 88 individuals "who self-reported multiracial ancestry" recruited in the U.S. (Ma, Kantner, and Wittenbrink 2021), while the India dataset depicts 142 individuals recruited in Delhi, India (Lakshmi et al 2021). Our current RQs pertain to the temporal changes in the ITA models; therefore, we do not analyze these two datasets or the outputs we receive for them from the ITAs in this paper.…”

The politics of identity: The unexpected role of political orientation on racial categorizations of Kamala Harris

“…For this task, participants were shown pictures of female faces and asked to indicate their similarity using a nine‐point scale (1 = Very dissimilar ; 9 = Very similar ). Stimuli were selected from the Chicago Face Database (CFD; Ma, Correll, & Wittenbrink, 2015) and Indian Face Set expansion of the CFD (Lakshmi et al., 2021) and included five Indian faces, five Black faces, and one image of Harris. All targets were female and were selected to be approximately the same age as Harris (see Figure 1).…”

Face Templates for the Chicago Face Database

“…The Chicago Face Database (CFD; Lakshmi et al, 2021;Ma et al, 2015Ma et al, , 2020 comprises over 800 faces and has been downloaded thousands of times by researchers around the world. The first two versions of the database contained American faces of different races including Black, White, Latinx, and Asian.…”