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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.
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.
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.