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:People hate freaks.

[AioKits]

Yeah, damned vampires and demons! I kid! Sides, I say this as a furry. Most the time it's not really prejudice, it's more like caution towards us. I'll be the first to admit, some of us look pretty odd, even by my standards. Some of us also act like total douches. Most of us are harmless though and tend to mimic /b/ way more than we care to admit. Enough of that talk tho. *sighs and dons target again* Sides, we developed into where we are now with tribal behaviors, it's not going to go away cause we have iPods and HD.