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.

Comments

you care more for your own kind, its science!

[Cito]

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.

Re:you care more for your own kind, its science!

[Anonymous Coward]

They did this study with kids and dolls in the 80s.

We are programmed to prefer our own kind and ethnicity.

Actually, blacks favored whites too in those studies.

Re:you care more for your own kind, its science!

[Grishnakh]

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.

Opposite axioms lead to opposite conclusions

[mi]

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:

• All groups of people (genders, races, religions) are, on average, the same and any statistically-observed differences in their behavior or treatment can only be due to bigotry.
• All groups of people (genders, races, religions) are, on average, treated the same and any statistically-observed differences in their behavior or treatment can only be due their own differences from others.

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:

1. Vastly more Black kids (67%!) are growing up in single-parent households than any other race.
2. Asian kids — who should be, if the "Whites-are-racists" narrative is to be believed, be suffering just as well — are, in fact, doing so well, college admission boards (adherents of the first axiom) penalize them by about 140 points compared to Whites. It is so ugly, some Asians choose to not answer the "race" question on their application at all.

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.

Worthless Study

[thechemic]

I agree. The entire study is stupid. In the study, they admit this correlation:

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...