A thought on face blindness

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In the past three years I've been lots of places and seen countless people in all kinds of settings and I've developed a theory and I wonder if anyone else heres shares the same experience.

It all lies around the fact that it seems almost every person I see now looks like someone else I've seen. For instance one of the reporters I now work with looks to me just like the service desk clerk I worked with when I was a grocery stocker. Another reporter I work with looks like a person that interned at the old station I worked at in Wyoming and so on....

Have you ever heard someone say "boy you look just like (...)?"

We have the 16 myers-briggs personality types, and I think that if someone were to do the same with faces, they could probably cut the billions of people on this earth down to a maybe a few hundred basic facial types for each race on earth.

So how does that play into face blindness? Well for me when I look at people, I see the basic facial type, but not all the subtleties that sets them apart from others who share that same facial type.

you know.. a lot of times i classify people into my own facial category.

Oh you look like a Brian...
you look like an Andy...

i match facial features with people ive seen in the past.
when i try to explain this to other people, they're like you're crazy! they dont look anything alike... but whatever... i see it and thats all that matters

To me, almost everyone looks the same in real life (but not when I focus on photograph or study closely their facial features, but then I cannot put them into a "you look like" category except when I fail to study their features, which happens).

However, I tend to remind people with one detail, mostly hair (curly, colour, etc) so I tend to have category about that like : "Dawn's hair", "Francis' hair" etc.

Some people seem to have different features though, they may share it with other people, sometimes it's linked to their ethnic origin.

i know what you mean. it's like there are only about 50 person molds and the people finishers just put little tweaks on them to individualize, but due to budget constraints they've outsourced the labor and are using cheaper materials than they used to. because as the years go on you see more and more people who resemble other people you've known.

ITA with this, everyone looks like everyone else. I was probably LESS faceblind as a child bc I had seen less faces in my lifetime.

I am VERY good at remembering details and specific features of faces that stand out from the rest or that seem unfamiliar to me.

I think there might be something to your thoughts, Scoots5012.

The other day when I was meeting a new group of people they introduced themselves to me. But I know I am a hopeless case at face recognition and also in that situation we needed a topic to get a conversation started and I just said the first thing that came to my mind. Basically it was something along the lines of "It's very nice that you are introducing yourselves to me, but I'm afraid I won't be remembering your names the next time we meet as I am awful with names and also somewhat face-blind".
They had not heard the term before and I started to explain it. One of them thought about it for a moment and then he said "So for you we all look the same? Like all people in Shanghai would look the same to us?"

I read somewhere that brains file away hundreds of details of the faces we see when we grow up and form a kind of "average" face and that later we only compare a new face to that average face and file away the differences and recognize a certain person by the pattern of differences. As we tend to see mostly faces of the ethnic group prevailant where we grow up (Caucasians if you grow up in Europe, Asians if you grow up in Japan and so on) this average face tends to represent that ethnic group. People from other ethnic groups tend to spark the same pattern of differences and are thus more difficult to tell apart.

So if you assume that face-blindness interferes with the process of deriving the average face and makes it more difficult to pick out patterns of differences as our brains are usually wired to do, it makes sense that face-blind people should have similar difficulties telling apart people from their own ethnic group (as well as from others) as non-face-blind peole have telling apart people that are from an ethnic group that is not the same as the average face their brain refers to.

Hope this makes sense to any of you.