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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!
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.
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?
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.
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.