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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.
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 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!
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.
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.
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.
Nice of you to frame it as "black vs. white". Not every study has to be comprehensive, and merely limiting the study is not evidence of an attempt to attack one group.
Seriously, grow up.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
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.
Interesting point. I was also wondering if they are possibly skipping over other reasons why it would happen. I have seen studies that have shown that Black people are generally perceived as more adult (the study did not control for how psychologically adult they actually were, so we have no idea if it is simply perception or an actual attribute). So that would imply that since you would be more inclined to view a black person as capable of looking after themselves that you would be less likely to lend your aid to one. I have no doubt that the age of the virtual person would highly influence the number of helpful individuals. Which very well might not be a reciprocated relationship.
It also makes me wonder how else did the virtual people differentiate. Was the white one 5'2", skinny, and approximately 100 pounds; While the Black one was 6'3", 200 pounds, and looked infinity more capable of looking after himself? Or did they simply take the same model and change the skin color?
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
The study says that in the fire scenario the racism disappeared.
The article was sufficient to demonstrate racial bias even with virtual participants.
It says nothing about black versus white versus white versus black. That's you reading racism into a study where the people involved probably (a) don't care much about specific races and (b) didn't have the time or money to have a larger study covering more options.
Randomly complaining about racism where none exists. Does this mean I get to call you an SJW? Seriously, I don't know. SJW seems to get used more or less for everything at the moment.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
No it isn't. 100 participants is enough for 99% confidence with a plus/minus 5% confidence interval.
Closest-to-the kin (you save closest family first, then tribe, then nation, then neighboring allied nations and so on). All of that is of course instinct demonstrated on animal models over and over.
On animal models its also demonstrated that sheer brute force often wins (ie both racism and rape is ok according to animal models).
The problem with using biological models, or nature-vs-nurture to justify behavior is that it reduces humans to animals and defy civilization as such, so it usually does not carry enough weight to bother with it in sociology discourse as it's too easily shot down from too many angles.
This study is interesting that it was conducted on humans, in recent toxic PC climate. It is of course carefully worded, ie "empirical study", "we don't know if its nature vs nurture etc", but it's easy to draw conclusions on your own with basic knownledge of statistics. Understandably nobody wants to spell out anything explicit and be labeled next Josef Mengele. But yeah, people are instinctively racist unless they rationally overcome that urge, just like one must suppress many other urges of our stupid animal lizard brain. Boohoo. News at 11. But don't say that on national TV.
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.