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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.
Nothing has changed.
http://phocks.tumblr.com/post/...
Human beings are programmed for all kinds of undesirable behaviour. Resolving conflict through violence, males procreating with as many females as possible and preventing others from doing likewise, extreme tribalism etc. That's not an excuse for any of it though, because we are supposed to learn better during childhood and grow up into responsible adults.
If you can't get past someone's race and stop being biased towards them then there is something wrong with you as an adult. It's excusable in young children who don't know any better and don't control their emotions and instincts, but not in adults.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Resolving conflict through violence, males procreating with as many females as possible and preventing others from doing likewise, extreme tribalism etc.
The pre-European-contact Hawaiians and many other indigenous cultures (pre-European-contact usually) completely disagree with you. In Hawaiian culture, they didn't even have marriage; people just had sex with whoever, whenever, no one knew who kids' fathers were, and the kids were raised collectively by their villages. In some South American tribe, people think kids can have multiple fathers, so women wanting a kid have sex with a bunch of different men they like, hoping to endow the child with traits from each of them.
It's only various expansionist cultures which pushed the idea that women are owned by men and their sexuality is to be controlled by them.
Not saving an avatar doesn't show that you're biased against them, because they don't exist.
Discriminating between saving black vs white avatars does indicate some sort of bias. Deal with it.
Am I racist because I like green coloured avatars,
Adding green colored avatars would be an interesting experiment; would they similarly be discriminated against on average? Or would their introduction break the "real world to virtual world" parallel in the average mind and lead to any real-world biases not being applied; leading to no discernible bias... or perhaps you need to eliminate black and white as options and only have green, orange, and purple avatars... and then that might be interesting too. Would their be a bias... would people bias towards helping other avatars with the same color as their own avatar... would orange be universally favored regardless of the color of self? Would players own real life colorings affect the displayed bias or lack thereof. I couldn't say.
But if there is a definite bias displayed, then there is a definite bias. Racism is one possible and reasonable explanation that can't be discounted out of hand.
Although depending on the textures and lighting... maybe it was simply because the white ones were easier to see...?
or a criminal because I have a penchant for rogue classes?
A criminal? no. but it does say something about you; if you examine the reasons why you have a penchant for rogue classes; I'm sure you'll find something out about yourself reflected in that.
and I don't go around pickpocketing IRL either.
I find it interesting you mention pickpocketing at all. My interest in rogue classes tends to focus on their stealth and back stab attacks -- I have a friend who plays rogues and his interest is always in their fast-talk / deception skills. But you... you mentioned pickpocketing... interesting. ;)
Leaving women to burn was for most of recent history the default. During the Victorian Age Anglo-Americans really became obsessed with the notion of chivalry, and part of that was the idea that men should help women and children. If the Titanic had sunk in an earlier age you can bet that the life-boats would have been sausage fests. Outside of Anglo-American cultures women and children are often abandoned during strife, depending on how much of this aspect of Anglo-American culture has been adopted (or, of course, whether there are similar norms native to the culture).
Some feminists struggle with ideas such as men opening doors for women, which is another vestige from the Victorian Age of gender-based chivalry. While it's nice to have a door opened for you, the cultural subtext is tainted by notions of helplessness and power. And some people can't get over that. (I'm an equal opportunity door-opener, FWIW.)
Now, what really blew my mind was visiting Shanghai. I had read that I might see elderly people give way to younger ones, but it wasn't until I saw with my own eyes elderly people giving up their seat on the subway to teenagers and 20-somethings that I finally understood how peculiar our customs can be. (Of course, I understand the background to the behavior, what with the cultural revolution and then the one-child policy. Still, it really helped put even "obvious"-seeming cultural norms into perspective.)
Actually, I wonder how much of this is actual racism, and how much is ingrained biases based on color. People like white because it's reminiscent of day - light, transparent, revealing. People dislike black because it's reminiscent of night - dark, hidden, obscuring. I'm curious how the experiment would've turned out if they'd run it with a colored inanimate object. e.g. Subjects get a chance to retrieve a woman's white purse vs. a black purse during a robbery.
You may not be aware that there is lots of openly expressed racism in Europe - apparently much more so than in the US. This includes Italy. One of Italy's top soccer strikers (Mario Balotelli), who happens to be black, has suffered a lot of racist chants, and he's by no means the only example.