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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.
If the person who is escaping is Asian, would they be more inclined to ignore white people while trying to get out?
I'm god, but it's a bit of a drag really...
They did this study with kids and dolls in the 80s.
We are programmed to prefer our own kind and ethnicity.
Its a tribal thing that protected man for hundreds of thousands of years..
Political correctness morons want to call it racism but political correctness is anti individualism and promotes group think.
I wonder if some people would be *more* likely to discriminate in a VR environment than in real life, because it could let them do something morally repugnant that they wouldn't feel OK about doing in the real world.
Yeah but in a MORPG, I'll bet when you want a character to group with, you'll pick the black guy over the white guy in a fight.
This is my sig. There are many like it but this one is mine.
Damned bastard Khajit and Argonians, can't trust any of them ... wait, what?
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
The number of users who decided to help tripled when the virtual victim was white rather than black.
When the players themselves were black, they actually stopped to pop a cap in the black victims before they escaped.
I skimmed through the paper, and it is garbage! All of the participants in the study were white Italians- none were black, asian, or any other ethnicity. Consequently, they drew the conclusions they were looking for when they conducted this "scientific study", i.e. there was racial bias against black victims. I cannot believe this paper was published! The authors did not look at whether racial biases worked against other ethnicities in similar ways or numbers.
The real racial bias is the study itself!
Whenever statistics is used to talk about discrimination (sexual, racial, religious), two conflicting sets of axioms are employed by the people arguing. Allow me to enumerate:
Obviously, the first axiom — and conclusions — is the politically-correct official stance championed by the government. And I'd like to share it too. But it contradicts some of the well-known facts:
So, the first axiom is shot by reality...
Maybe, it is all about single-parenthood — all human cultures were highly suspicious of bastard children (the very term is a derogatory one). And not because the mother "sinned" — if that were the case, her subsequent marriage would not have absolved the child — but because it is much harder for a single parent to raise a child into a decent human being. So, the "preconditioned" response this study exposed may not be so much about race per se, as about the likelihood of the person to be not right in the head — they are about 2.5-3 times more likely to have grown up without a father.
It'd be interesting, if the study used Whites, who've grown up in those parts of the world, where Blacks' incidence of single-parenthood is not so awfully lopsided. And compared them with the American Whites.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
The Drow race are legitimately douchebags though. I think we can all agree on that.
Nothing has changed.
http://phocks.tumblr.com/post/...
They should make same experiment with helping man versus woman. I'm quite sure that male participants would rescue more females than males. I wonder how it would other way - there is a good chance that female test subjects would also rescue females more often.
If this is the case, we would have a perfect proof for gender discrimination and should invest into "leave women to burn" sensitivity trainings for everybody.
With further studies, they would determine than attractive females are more often rescued then ugly ones, by both sexes. We can then do obligatory anti-discrimination 102 course, "Let pretty ones burn to death". We could practice by burning barbie dolls, as they are promoting unhealthy body proportions. Which would be strange, because it would mean that they are pretty, which they should not be. So, we should be burning dolls with more realistic body build. But should they be white? If they are white, we will get sued for saying that only white ones are pretty. If they are black... HR sensitivity training based around burning black dolls... not good. We want WHITE pretty girls to die, not black pretty girls.
Marshmallows ! Maybe this will go into subconcious part of the mind - if you burn enough white marshmallows, it will come natural to you later with real fire.
Now, when I think about our last team building event, there was almost unlimited supply of marshmallows next to the bonfire... can it be already happening?
It's almost as if helping people survive who are similar to you could have an evolutionary advantage over helping people less similar to you.
Being of the same ethnicity as the helper makes the victim appear more similar, and people act more favorably toward people perceived as similar to them; furthermore, it makes the helper feel a member of the same (ethnic) group as the victim, and members of the same group are treated more favorably than non-members.
Any person with half a brain would ensure that the participant pool included members from all cultural backgrounds. But that wasn't the case:
The participants were Italian and white.
.
So they tested racial bias for white helping blacks, but they did not test for bias when blacks had to assist whites even though they KNEW there was a strong correlation in willingness to assist when similar cultural backgrounds are involved. Then, they take the test results (which were obvious before the study even began) and ran to the internet with cries of racism amongst Italian and white people. Ridiculous...
Let's make like a bird... and get the flock outta here.
tl;dr: WE HAVE ACHIEVED PEAK CAUCASITY
...). The argument became so over simplified it becomes self-contradictory.
Actually did RTFA. This experiment in aversive racism seems to assume broad definition racism, ie "us vs them", or group membership.
At this moment, colloquial use of word "racism" in clickbait media is essentially interchangeable with "bigotry". Sadly how words are used define their meaning, not the other way around. But yes, most people are bigoted. Even the pope is bigoted towards the idea of hell, fallen angels and satan (recently he promised to like gays; which is actually somewhat encouraging).
You see, we europeans with crooked teeth are long past carnal racism based on obvious cues like skin color - owing to being class based serfdoms, instead of color based chattel slavery cultures in recent history. So we're left with no choice to hate thy neighbor based on ethnicity and/or nationality.
Also, taking this all the way to ad-absurdum conclusion - a liberal not being fond of a conservative for being bigoted is racist (because hating political leaning is racist, just like hating russians because of stalin, or hating germans because of hitler or
When the shouting match between stormfronters and white guilt becomes polarised like it did recently, new words get invented and old meanings get redefined just by the sheer volume of simpleton shit sprung in both directions of camps of this career activism.
Random (not)interesting tidbit: The nationality people around the world are racist towards the most is not blacks (or "people of color", or whatever its called today), not even chinese, but North Americans as a whole. This is just a speculation - eastern parts of europe, arab nations and large parts of asia would unilaterally prefer to sacrifice an american, instead of one of their supergroup. American race being defined by your accent and certain "american" behaviorial stereotypes.
Are we so sure that racism stems only from social and cultural biases? Could there not be a biological component to this as well? How does one affect the other? Can we ever know?
I'm just sayin' - people lay all the blame on society but I wonder how much stems from base instinct.
Love sees no species.
The study says that in the fire scenario the racism disappeared.