Abstract
Previous research abroad describes the cross-race effect as a limiting factor when people try to recognize a person of an ethnicity other than their own. This study examines the influence of the other-race effect in the Czech Republic, mainly focusing on the majority Czech and minority Vietnamese.
One hundred and fifty-three individuals participated in this study. The participants were mainly chosen from three specific occupations for the purpose of this research.
The occupations were policemen (n=35), clerks (n=61), students (n=37), and other occupations (n=20). All of the participants were given a stimulus in the form of a video depicting a simulated assault with either Czech and Vietnamese offenders.
After a determined amount of time, the participants were asked to identify the offender in a photo-lineup. Their confidence in their answer was self-rated on 7 point-scale.
Given the results of previous international research, we anticipated a negative influence of ethnicity on the subject's ability to correctly recognize the perpetrator. Participants of the Czech nationality in the presented research showed a higher rate of false identification and false rejections of other-nationality offenders and higher correct choices of same-nationality offenders.
There was no found relationship between a person who correctly identified one offender and correctly identifying others of either Czech or foreign ethnicity. Furthermore high confidence was significantly related with accuracy of identifying a same-nationality offender, but had no relation to identifying an other-nationality offender.
This confirmed the impact of the cross-race effect. The influence of the respondents occupation was not significant.