Original title: Does confidence indicate face-identity matching accuracy for own-race and other-race faces?
Geraldine Jeckeln, ALICE O'TOOLE · September 2026
People are usually better at matching faces of their own race than faces of other races. But does your confidence still show whether you are right when looking at another race? Researchers tested Caucasian and African American participants on face matching. Instead of asking people to rate their confidence on a number scale, they had them do two trials in a row and choose which trial they felt more confident about. The researchers found that people were indeed less accurate on other-race faces. However, feeling more confident still meant a person was more likely to be accurate, even across races. Also, trial difficulty helped guide confidence consistently for same-race faces, but not always for other-race faces.
You are a bird watcher who can spot local birds easily. When you travel to a new region, you make more mistakes. You might also think your confidence in identifying a foreign bird is less trustworthy. Here, the researchers found that for both familiar and unfamiliar faces, people's confidence equally predicts accuracy, even though matching overall is worse for unfamiliar faces.
When a witness identifies someone of a different race, they are more likely to be wrong, but this study shows that their confidence still reliably indicates whether they are correct. That matters for police and courts, who often rely on witness confidence to judge reliability. It also reveals that the way confidence is guided by task difficulty differs between racial groups, which could affect how confidence is interpreted across cultures.
The abstract does not explicitly state limitations, but the study only uses Caucasian and African American participants, so findings may not extend to other racial groups. The confidence forced-choice task differs from real-world confidence reports, which might affect how confidence is expressed. Additionally, the results for Caucasian participants suggest that the mechanism guiding confidence via difficulty differs for other-race faces.
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Does confidence indicate face-identity matching accuracy for own-race and other-race faces? — Geraldine Jeckeln, ALICE O'TOOLE — PsyArXiv — doi:10.31234/osf.io/u4fg6_v2
Abstract licence: CC BY
Explanation generated by Synthesis from the abstract — it is not the original paper. This is a preprint, so it hasn't necessarily been peer reviewed.