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Racial Discrimination Affects Virtual Reality Characters Too
vrml writes: You are looking for the exit of a building in a virtual reality experience when a virtual character gets stuck in a room and cries for your help. Could the color of the skin (black or white) of the virtual human influence your decision to provide or refuse help? That's what comes out from a new study published by the journal Computers in Human Behavior. White users were told that they had to reach the exit of the virtual building as soon as possible. The number of users who decided to help tripled when the virtual victim was white rather than black. Researchers tried also other conditions in which they did not put users under time pressure: this reduced the discrimination, although the number of users who helped remained more favorable for the white rather than the black virtual human. The paper explains these results in terms of the automatic categorization processes that originate from unwanted, unconscious social and cultural biases: putting people under pressure increases automatic responses, leading to more discrimination towards the black character.
They did this study with kids and dolls in the 80s.
We are programmed to prefer our own kind and ethnicity.
Actually, blacks favored whites too in those studies.
For me, the page is blank but then redirects to: http://www.sciencedirect.com/s...
From the PDF:
The participants were Italian and white. They were psychology students (N = 96; 48 women, 48 men) who volunteered to participate without any reward. Their mean age was 24 (SD = 2.82).
Nice of them to not even test black people saving white, that way white people can feel like shit.
Us white devils should all feel bad because of our white privilege and stuff...
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
The study says that in the fire scenario the racism disappeared.
No it isn't. 100 participants is enough for 99% confidence with a plus/minus 5% confidence interval.
This is how science works. The experiment does not make claims outside of the experimental parameters. If you interpret that as implying some sort of claim about white people versus black people, that's your problem. Go research other studies to fill in the gaps.