Whenever you bring together dozens of different countries from around the globe, there’s bound be some cross-cultural confusion. The World Cup is no…
Whenever you bring together dozens of different countries from around the globe, there’s bound be some cross-cultural confusion. The World Cup is no exception.
And if you’re Shin Tae-yong, coach of the South Korean national team, you figure out how to work that confusion to your advantage. In a press conference Sunday, Shin explained the unusual tactic he’d employed against scouts from the Swedish team: He’d had his team members swap jersey numbers for the warm-up games, in hopes that scouts wouldn’t be able to tell the players apart.
« It’s very difficult for Westerners to distinguish between Asians, » Shin explained, as quoted by ESPN. He added, « We wanted to confuse the Swedish team… That’s why we did that. » Shin’s comments came after a Swedish scout was believed to have observed a closed practice of the South Korean team.
Shin’s strategy didn’t pay off quite the way he intended — Sweden beat South Korea 1-0 in their match earlier today.
But we wanted to know whether or not the jersey-swap actually might have tripped people up. Are Westerners really that bad at telling apart Asian faces, as Shin claimed?
To help explain the science, we spoke to Alice O’Toole, a professor at the University of Texas at Dallas, who has been researching human recognition of faces since the late 1990s.
Below are highlights from our conversation.
NPR: Is it really more difficult for people from one racial group to recognize faces from another racial group?
Alice O’Toole: So, it has been known since the late sixties, actually, that humans, given a task to learn new faces and to recognize them at a later date, are simply more accurate when the faces they’re trying to learn and remember are faces of their own race, as opposed to faces of another race.
