Distinguishing Race by Face

[Adam's Apple]

Interesting. I know that I could not distinguish Asians or Hispanics by just looking at facial features.

People of Another Race Find It Harder to Read Your Face
By Iris Kuo, Knight Ridder Media Services
May 1, 2006

U.S. forces in Iraq sometimes have mistakenly admitted foreign insurgents because they couldn't tell Saudis or Egyptians from Iraqis, according to Steve Casteel, a U.S. security consultant who until recently advised Iraq's interior ministry, which handles domestic security. Iraqi police who later picked up foreign fighters would discover that the foreign insurgents had convinced U.S. screeners that they were Iraqis.

U.S. drug agents sometimes can't tell Colombian leaders of smuggling groups from the Peruvian and Bolivian peasants who work for them, said Casteel, a vice president at Vance International, a worldwide security firm based in Oakton, Va. An agent's ignorance can be dangerous, he continued, because Colombian smugglers are more likely to be armed and violent.

The Innocence Project, a New York nonprofit legal clinic that tracks life imprisonment convictions that are overturned by DNA evidence, found that white eyewitnesses misidentified innocent blacks 44 percent of the time. That's nearly twice as often as they misidentified innocent whites.

for full article:
http://www.keepmedia.com/pubs/BiloxiSunHerald/2006/05/01/1515462

www.alllooksame.com
www.eyewitness.utep.edu

 

[dmp]

Eyewitness testimony should often be over-looked.

 

[Hobbit]

It's because the facial features that distinguish one person from another are different for each race. For white people, it's cheek structure, eye color, hair color, eyebrow shape, lip fullness, chin shape, and ear type (that I can think of). For blacks and Asians, most of those things don't change from person to person.

However, with my background, I have come to be able to tell a lot of stuff that most whites can't (grew up in a lot of diversity). For example, I can tell by looking whether an Asian is Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Malaysian, or southeastern (Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, etc.), and I can also tell a Mexican, Bolivian, Brazilian, or Ecuadoran. However, I admit that it's not easy.

 

[The ClayTaurus]

It's because the facial features that distinguish one person from another are different for each race. For white people, it's cheek structure, eye color, hair color, eyebrow shape, lip fullness, chin shape, and ear type (that I can think of). For blacks and Asians, most of those things don't change from person to person.

However, with my background, I have come to be able to tell a lot of stuff that most whites can't (grew up in a lot of diversity). For example, I can tell by looking whether an Asian is Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Malaysian, or southeastern (Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, etc.), and I can also tell a Mexican, Bolivian, Brazilian, or Ecuadoran. However, I admit that it's not easy.

Alright hoss. Prove it

http://www.alllooksame.com/

I want a screen shot of your results

 

[Hobbit]

Above average, but like I said, it's hard. I didn't really see a huge variety of Asians until college, so it helps if I can see more than their faces.

 

[The ClayTaurus]

Above average, but like I said, it's hard. I didn't really see a huge variety of Asians until college, so it helps if I can see more than their faces.

Gotta see if the curtains match the drapes, eh?

 

[Hobbit]

Gotta see if the curtains match the drapes, eh?

More like build differences. Koreans are a bit stockier than most Asian races (which isn't saying much), and the proportion between head, torso, and limbs varies slightly between the different races. I'm far from perfect, but the fact that I can do it all is amazing. It's hard as hell and I have to take a good long look and think most of the time. A dead givaway, though, is that I can almost always pin a native born Asian to their country of origin if I can hear them talk. I've had a Korean roommate, several really good Vietnamese friends, and classes and friends for both Chinese and Japanese, so I can usually pin the accent. If I listen long enough, I can sometimes even pin the Chinese regional accents, but not very often.