Researchers Find Racial Bias In Virtual Worlds

schliz writes "Real-world behaviours and racial biases could carry forward into virtual worlds such as Second Life, social psychologists say. According to a study that was conducted in There.com, virtual world avatars respond to social cues in the same ways that people do in the real world. Users, who were unaware that they were part of a psychological study, were approached by a researcher's avatar for either a 'foot-in-the-door' (FITD) or 'door-in-the-face' (DITF) experiment. While results of the FITD experiment revealed no racial bias, the effect of the DITF technique was significantly reduced when the experimenter took the form of a dark-skinned avatar."

Comments

Re:FITD vs DITF

[Dun Malg]

See, what you're missing is that people have no natural racism per se, but rather we have a natural tendency towards "group identity". In a biological sense, human history hasn't been some happy fairy tale where we all just get along as one groovy family. Our natural tendency is towards supporting our own familial group or tribe. Physical traits are simply one way of telling "us from them". Language is another. So yeah, when you put two people together in a room, the only "us" will be the two of them, so there'll be a tendency towards inclusiveness.