Podemos atenuar o viés-da-mesma-etnia? Um estudo sobre o efeito do aviso em tarefas de reconhecimento de faces

Abstract

We currently live in a world with a high level of migratory flow, and Portugal is no exception. In this context, it is to be expected that a well-known memory bias may occur-namely, the difficulty individuals of a given ethnicity have in recognizing individuals of another ethnicity, known as the own-race bias. In a forensic context, this bias translates into a witness of a certain ethnicity having increased difficulty identifying, in a lineup or facial matrix, a suspect of a different ethnicity. The consequences of this difficulty are obvious: an innocent suspect may be wrongly identified as the perpetrator of a crime. This dissertation aims to study the effect of a warning on reducing the own-race bias. That is, it seeks to explore whether informing a witness about the existence of this bias can reduce its effect. It was expected that in the control group, whose participants were not warned about the existence of the bias, its magnitude would be greater than in the group that received a warning about the bias. We confirmed that this initial theory was partially correct, and it became evident that the warning is an ally in mitigating the bias, although it presents some nuances that should be studied further. Namely, the reason why the warning did not reduce or eliminate the bias toward the Latino ethnicity. We also found that the use of the warning did not alter the participants' response criterion, as they did not appear to be more conservative or liberal in any of the conditions.