October 25, 2004

• I got 10/18; Evidently I am "ok"
• 11/18 here...so far I'm winning!
• I got "hopeless".
• If it matters, I am screwed, because I only got 2 correct. That is bad but how can you tell if someone is chinese, japanese or korean? Are there telltale differences? If so, what are they?
• I demand a recount!
• I'm just hopelessly disappointed in my score, and in myself for getting that score.
• often i don't even realize oriental people aren't caucasion. for example, i never realized my sister's half-japanese friend wasn't caucasion for years.
• "Also, dude, oriental is not the preferred nomenclature. Asian American, please."
• Obviously, I can't tell the difference. Koko ashamed.
• "Asian American, please." This curious seppo asks non-US MoFi-ites: Is this type of usage used in other english-speaking countries? Does one say "asian-australian", for example? If so, is it considered nice to do, not so polite, or both.
• Not as much. In the UK, 'asian' means India, Pakistan, Bangladesh.
• Woohoo! Inversely amazing! I am such a roundeye ...
• well... i suck at this. of course i'd probably suck just as much at the caucasian version - like "German, Italian, or French?" for example - so i take solace in that...
• My score? 3/18 = "Inversely Amazing - it's amazing you could get so many wrong". My parents grew up in Japan and I'm part Japanese, my aunt is Korean, I've dated Chinese and Japanese (and Thai) women. I believe I've seen a few Asian people. I also believe there are "typical" Japanese and Korean faces just as there are, for example, "typical" Italian faces but you wouldn't be that surprised to meet an Italian who "looked Irish" or "Norwegian". In fact, I bet most Italians don't "look Italian", just as most Japanese don't "look Japanese". Many people who meet me think I'm Italian because I have a "typically" Italian face, yet I have 0% Italian heritage. It'd be pretty easy to put together a site with some typically atypical European faces and demonstrate that nobody can tell Europeans apart. (btw, I don't think there's a typical Chinese face because the term "Chinese" encompasses so many different ethnic groups)
• or post preview, what caution live frogs said.
• 5/18 Er.
• I got 7, the average. But I'm not sure what to think about that, since my mother always told me I'm anything but average. (Nice job messing with my expectations for life, mom.)
• This topic reminded me of an article carried in Life Magazine, a few weeks after the Pearl Harbor attack. "How to tell Japs from the Chinese" (pages reproduced here). I remember a reference to this article in a high school history text but never looked it up until just now.
• 7/18 - average, apparently, which is never good. Agreeing with bratcat, are there documented obvious differences that I should have been looking for, any more than there are obvious differences between, say, English, Australians and Americans? Or to take three more diverse-yet-geographically-quite-similar groups, between Swedes, Dutch and Czechs? (on preview, what caution live frogs and timefactor both said....)
• 6/18, I once thought I could tell the difference, then I lived in Japan for two and a half years. Now I cant. But since the Japanese and Koreans originally came out from China, and the only real difference between Japanese and Koreans (as opposed to say, Cambodians and Thai) is in the diet, there is probably a pretty healthy cross-section that would be indistinguishable. Though I can usually tell the difference between an American and someone from a different continent. Though thats not as much of an achievment, I guess.
• Did this test at work a couple years ago, where everybody was from everywhere, in a city where everybody was from everywhere, and we all sucked except for one Filipino/Canadian guy. And I don't necessarily believe being Filipino was the reason for his high score - I think the guy just had a better eye for detail than most. In Canada, our ideal is that everyone be "Canadianized" (love/hate Don Cherry, dig poutine and Tim Horton's, bitch about Americans and Quebec) while at the same time accepting most of the customs and traditions brought from the old country as valid. Nowhere in there do I see the need to studiously scrutinize facial features for racial background. I think it rude to presume to do so - obviously most people aren't very good at it, as this test shows, and I think more people would resent being presumed to be of one background or another rather than just being accepted as "Bob from Accounting". I like this quote from the site, "Much of racism is complicated by the fear of being called a racist. Not being able to admit one
• 4/18 for me. Give me one for any group and I'd probably do as poorly.
• Isn't this kind of like asking whether one can tell the difference between Swedes, French, and Italians?
• The first half of the test had way more atypical looking Asians than the second half. I agree with timefactor about the creation of a European test. The biggest cheat the test pulls is having the the one guy with blonde hair. That was so distracting it was difficult to look at his face.
• I didn't even finish taking the test. There is no way to know from the photographs how representative the person's facial features are of the presumed average in their country; some people who are Japanese have unusual faces, some Koreans look like Chinese, etc. This almost seems to encourage racism in a way by forcing the testee to stereotype in the most visceral way possible, categorizing the people as one of three types of Other.
• 7/18: average. It would be interesting to see how the results compare to a random distribution. I mean, even with 1000 monkeys tapping out random answers, you'd get some monkeys who were "really good" at recognizing faces, others that were "hopeless", and most would be "average". You'd expect the average to be 6 in that case. Since the average for us humans is 7 instead of 6, that means were just one better than the monkeys.
• Isn't this kind of like asking whether one can tell the difference between Swedes, French, and Italians? Reminds me of a book of Scandinavian humor that had a section on how to distinguish a Dane from a Swede from a Norwegian, and proceeded to use the same models for each example, changing the clothing and accessories only slightly. On this test, I scored 4/18, and was bummed about that until I came here and found a lot of company. I'd feel awfully presumptuous leaping to a conclusion about a person I'd just met, and given my score, that's a good thing.
• We should do a MoFite or MeFite test.
• 6/18. I guess tha makes me a monkey.
• 7/18, not so good, about what I expected. Funny, I was recently thinking of posting a question about this, when I was wondering just what the heck is meant when somebody says a certain political candidate currently visible in the U.S. mass media "looks French." I am an American of mixed Western-European ancestry (English, French, German, Italian, who knows what else.) Sometimes I think I know what French-looking means and sometimes not. My little theory is for many raised of us in the U.S. at least, 'ethnicity' mainly means white, black, or other, so a lot of us never learn any finer distinctions.
  Maybe off-topic but has anyone else ever noticed a person who looks like a 'different-race' version of someone you know? Like, 'oh gosh, that's what Mike would look like if he was white', or 'look over there, it's the Indian Freddie Mercury'... I used to be ashamed of these thoughts thinking they were racist, but now I think they show how we may recognize facial features independent of race. Then again maybe that's just me.
  I liked the site. I'm always surprised when a white American thinks they know Japanese from Chinese from Korean. Ironically this just happened to a Chinese friend I was with at a Rugby match: somebody(white) said "you look Japanese." Like it's some kind of game show. I'm glad My friend wasn't from Manchuria.
• no, I never 'knew' Freddie Mercury. I should have said 'recognize'. The example just popped into my head because there's this guy I see around my workplace.... never mind.
• I once saw a black woman who looked like my swedish grandmother. So, yeah, I agree with you there, spectrusery. On the test I got 4, which is terrible, especially since I live in San Francisco.
• I always enjoy spotting "evil twins" of my friends in bars. Once I spotted "Confused Ian," who looked like my friend Ian, except he seemed to be very confused. Maybe you had to be there.
• I thought Freddie Mercury (born Farrokh Bulsara) had ancestral ties to the Indian Parsi community. But yes, to your main point about different-race doppelgangers. I have cousins who look like swarthy versions of Rick(y) Schroeder and Richard Marx.
• 6/18 here as well *ook* *ook*. my chinese gf is going to beat me ;) Previously, I've found it not _too_ difficult to distinguish between the asian 'races', but usually that's based more on body-type than facial structures. Was I alone in thinking that a bunch of those people looked more anglo/asian than 'pure' japanese/korean/etc? Of course, not having lived in any of those countries I'm not sure whether a 'pure' japanese person/etc can have round eyes and white skin or not...
• I'm not sure whether a 'pure' japanese person/etc can have round eyes and white skin or not...
• swarthy versions of Rick(y) Schroeder and Richard Marx. Oh dear. Dear oh dear oh dear.
• Momma! Aww momma!
• I'm going to accept all this as confirming that I need no longer feel bad when I make p2p mistakes. I scored a 3 and was sorta embarrassed, until I thought it over and read all the comments. /whew. free of guilt at last. I realise now that by trying to figure out people's origin I was doing a racial disservice. Asian. Further details, only as needed.
• I did shit and I live in Asia and see Chinese, Japanese, and Korean people everyday. I think the makers of this test specifically chose not only atypical Asians, but also Chinese who look like Japanese, etc. I showed this to a few Taiwanese friends of mine and they did just as poorly. The test is rigged, I tell you, rigged!! /rant
• tinfoil sorting hat: best name ever!
• I'm with TSH, the test is rigged.
• 7/18 just average I guess.
• 10/18 Hair dye always makes me think Japanese. Cos, you know, anime people of all hair colors speak Japanese.
• If the 2157 monkeys living in my computer had a go at it, the results would be.. 0: 20 1: 13 2: 64 3: 150 4: 293 5: 354 6: 436 7: 338 8: 258 9: 146 10: 66 11: 27 12: 9 13: 1 average: 6.0134445989800653 median: 6 me? I got 6.
• *Annoying ascii graphic of the above* 00 *** 01 ** 02 *********** 03 *************************** 04 ***************************************************** 05 **************************************************************** 06 ******************************************************************************** 07 ************************************************************** 08 *********************************************** 09 ************************** 10 ************ 11 **** 12 * 13 14 15 16 17 18
• Nine for me. I'm ok. I'm dammed by faint praise. Everything I'd say about this has already been said better by people above. However, I've also spotted people who looked like a different race version of somebody else. I think I even said it once to someone I was with. They just looked at me like I was crazy though.
• Hmm. I got 4, which surprises me not at all. It's interesting to look at the range variance of the scores posted here. 18 pictures, three choices, expected score is 6. Highest score so far is 11. Lowest is 2. Published mean is 7. I'd like to know where Richer got his data, but our tiny sample is consistent with it. On the evidence presented so far, I would suggest that nobody can tell the three groups apart to a level that is statistically significant. (waits to be ripped apart for poor statistical analysis)
• I got 6. But I really don't know any Korean people, so if I couldn't decide between Chinese and Japanese, I voted Korean.
• tinfoil sorting hat: best name ever! Thanks, court3nay. The name is clunky, but it's grown on me.
• tinfoil sorting hat: best name ever! Thanks, court3nay. The name is clunky, but it's grown on me.
• My data is from some Python I wrote for the occasion. It's just random numbers.
• I guessed and i got 13! Maybe i should go buy lottery numbers today?
• Faces and races in the human brain

  Golby et al. investigated European–American and African–American male volunteers who underwent functional magnetic resonance imagining while looking at pictures of men of both races. They authors found that faces of the same race as the observer elicit more activity in the fusiform gyrus in the ventral occipital cortex — a brain region known to be involved in the face recognition process (Nat Neurosci 2001, 4:845-850).

  Although I can't help wondering if it's about seeing members of the SAME race as much as it is seeing faces like the ones you grew up with.
• my hat is made of paper blown all the way from China read the words around its brim: I am printed by the sun and scribbled by the wind