You all look the same to me

(or: they all look …) (or: … all look alike) In the New Yorker‘s 7/20/26 issue, an Ivan Ehlers cartoon on this theme: The cross-species effect: to a shark, every non-shark looks the same — looks, in particular, like the most salient non-shark, the shark’s major prey animal the seal; plus, everything is funnier in cartoon SharkWorld (just put a cocktail glass into a shark’s fins) This is an analogue of the more familiar cross-race effect. From Wikipedia: The cross-race effect (sometimes called cross-race bias, other-race bias, own-race bias or other-race effect) is the tendency to more easily recognize faces that belong to one’s own racial group, or racial groups that one has been in contact with. … The cross-race effect is thought to contribute to difficulties in cross-race identification, as well as implicit racial bias. A number of theories as to why the cross-race effect exists have been conceived, including social cognition and perceptual expertise. However, no model has been able…