‘They All Look Alike to Me’ by Doctor Roy S. Paulpass covered peoples perceptions and they way they remembered data. Paulpass was perplexed by interpersonal perception and how people respond to individuals in terms of groups rather than separate individuals. Dr. Paulpass spent the next two decades doing research and experiments trying to uncover what drove interpersonal perception.
Paulpass’s first question was how did it start. What fueled Paulpass’s fury was that his town, though substantially populated by black residents, the fire department and police department were completely filled with only white employees. Why? Paulpass used his students to test a number of experiments to try to discover a reason behind whether there was a “differential recognition for vs. other-race faces.” This research turned out to be less than satisfying for Paulpass, who then tried obtain a sample of study participants to nail down whether faces were more or less distinguishable depending on their race. Paulpass’s first study concluded that most people did in fact associate faces with races more often than not.
Paulpass then took what he already gathered and moved on to the next phase of his study, explaining his findings. After many experiments and help from his graduate students, Paulpass was inclusive in his findings on why humans tend to associate face and racial background.
Although Paulpass could not find a why, he continued to study the connection between people and interpersonal perception and continues to research how and why people do not perceive people’s faces as much as their races, making one wonder if we all do look alike.