Virtual Reality Experiment Wants To Put White People In Black Bodies

Molly McHugh (3774987) writes with an intriguing use of VR technology: "It's as simple as making a light-skinned person feel connected to a virtual, darker skinned self—a thought experiment pretty much impossible without the immersive potency of VR. The effect is achieved by outfitting participants in VR headsets with built-in head-tracking and motion capture capabilities that sync actual movement to virtual experience." From the article: Evolving from cruder methods, VR is a natural extension of research examining the ways that people think differently when made to feel like they are part of a meaningfully different social group, known as an outgroup. ... What’s most exciting about this channel of research is that it gets at the kind of complex, subtle prejudices that most people can’t even articulate if asked directly.

Comments

Re:Only for white people ?

[slashmydots]

Seems rather biased to think that only white people can have racial biases.

Especially considering that most black people are raised to think white people are evil, racist, privileged assholes and that learning and going to college are "too white."

Re:Easier method

[CajunArson]

"You tell your kids not to go to Chicago because of the crime, I tell mine not to go because of the police." --> "Politically Correct" racism, just as bigoted as some redneck telling his kids not to go to an integrated school because of the black kids.

Yeah, because the only way any black kid in Chicago has ever come to an untimely end was because those evil racist cops gunned him down for no reason. /Liberal self-reinforcing prejudice.

You obviously don't like your child very much if you want to convince him to mouth off to police instead of respecting them like anyone else should. If you really think the police are doing something wrong, the appropriate place to deal with it is in a courtroom, not some racial-war street fight that you are guaranteed to lose. You might find that if you drop your race-war attitude towards the police and treat them like human beings, they might just not be as "racist" as you think they are.