Mike Burton
Appearances
Hidden Brain
Do I Know You? (A Hidden Brain-Revisionist History special on facial recognition)
It's not, although it is a very common assumption. Most of us think we're pretty good at recognising faces. But when you actually test people out, particularly in the situation where somebody who doesn't know you is checking a photo against you, it turns out people are really bad at this. Interestingly, even professionals are really bad at it.
Hidden Brain
Do I Know You? (A Hidden Brain-Revisionist History special on facial recognition)
So we did some work with passport officers where we showed that even passport officers find this a very difficult task. and are often inaccurate.
Hidden Brain
Do I Know You? (A Hidden Brain-Revisionist History special on facial recognition)
No. There's all kinds of techniques that the people who do this professionally use. And what's interesting is they all believe themselves to be performing quite well. But when you test them, just like anybody else, they're actually not very accurate at this.
Hidden Brain
Do I Know You? (A Hidden Brain-Revisionist History special on facial recognition)
That is exactly what I'm telling you. I think that what's sort of interesting is that we have come to rely on this. But I think we've come to rely on it for an interesting reason. We are fantastic at recognising faces, those faces of people we know. We can recognise our family and friends across a huge range of conditions, you know, distances, in bad light, all kinds.
Hidden Brain
Do I Know You? (A Hidden Brain-Revisionist History special on facial recognition)
But we falsely assume that this means we're quite good at faces in general. And in fact, we're not.
Hidden Brain
Do I Know You? (A Hidden Brain-Revisionist History special on facial recognition)
So we set up this little experiment where we asked people to match pairs of faces. They just have to say, are these two faces the same person or not?
Hidden Brain
Do I Know You? (A Hidden Brain-Revisionist History special on facial recognition)
Yes, we use what we call B-list celebrities. So we check it out beforehand. But we use people who are known very well by the local population. These are people like, you know, newsreaders, local sports people. And they tend to be very well known by the local community, but not by people internationally.
Hidden Brain
Do I Know You? (A Hidden Brain-Revisionist History special on facial recognition)
What we find then is that when the UK people are matching UK celebrities, they're really good at it. And they're really poor at matching the Australian celebrities, the people that they don't know. When you look at the Australian students looking at these photos, you find exactly the opposite pattern. They're great at matching Australian celebrities and poor at matching UK celebrities.
Hidden Brain
Do I Know You? (A Hidden Brain-Revisionist History special on facial recognition)
So at this point, we know that there's nothing in the faces themselves that make them easy or hard to match. It's just in the perceptions of the viewers. So far, so good. We know that people are better at matching familiar faces. But what we then ask is, how well do you think other people will do on these faces when we give them the same task?
Hidden Brain
Do I Know You? (A Hidden Brain-Revisionist History special on facial recognition)
And what you find is that the UK viewers think other people will find the UK faces easier. The Australian viewers think other people will find the Australian photos easier. That can't both be true. it must be that they are falsely generalizing their own knowledge to other people.
Hidden Brain
Do I Know You? (A Hidden Brain-Revisionist History special on facial recognition)
That's right. It comes up in a number of areas of psychology, even something simple like general knowledge. If you happen to have read some books about Napoleon and be knowledgeable about Napoleon, you falsely generalize that and assume that other people know more about Napoleon than they actually do.
Hidden Brain
Do I Know You? (A Hidden Brain-Revisionist History special on facial recognition)
Of course, we all have our own different areas of specialist knowledge, and people turn out to be rather poor at understanding that and being able to generalize it. I'm wondering how good you are at facial recognition. I'm poor. On the tests, I'm just a little below average.
Hidden Brain
Do I Know You? (A Hidden Brain-Revisionist History special on facial recognition)
Well, I do now know how poor I am. I certainly would try not to rely on my own ability to do it. But I think that nobody really knew until the last few years just how bad we all are with unfamiliar faces. And it's just becoming clear now.