Researchers Find Racial Bias In Virtual Worlds 592
schliz writes "Real-world behaviours and racial biases could carry forward into virtual worlds such as Second Life, social psychologists say. According to a study that was conducted in There.com, virtual world avatars respond to social cues in the same ways that people do in the real world. Users, who were unaware that they were part of a psychological study, were approached by a researcher's avatar for either a 'foot-in-the-door' (FITD) or 'door-in-the-face' (DITF) experiment. While results of the FITD experiment revealed no racial bias, the effect of the DITF technique was significantly reduced when the experimenter took the form of a dark-skinned avatar."
Re:FITD vs DITF (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Dark skinned avatar in a virtual world ? (Score:3, Informative)
Actually, mod this informative... In SL at least, the use of black avatars for raiding has caused the moderators to be racist to black avatars. The moment someone in a black avatar does something funny they will usually get banned and MAC/HD serial banned.
Although I don't get why people are still doing research in virtual worlds. The entire VW industry is moving away from the notion of a user-created 'metaverse' to a corporate-controlled 'adverworld'. To the average slashdotter this seems horrible, but then you realize that most user-created 'metaverse' style VWs are full of sexual deviancy (furries, goreans, cannabalism fetishists) no one - neither new users or large corporations are willing to deal with that. Hence the tendancy of VW user populations to cap low and stay low.
This of course, does not apply to VWs which are willing to call themselves what they are: sandbox games. Things like Garry's Mod and the upcoming LittleBigPlanet have many features similar to VWs, but on average have much less sexual deviancy because normal users play these things in droves. They're actually fun because they're made by game developers and not VW people. So they aren't worrying about 'how do we make it an economy and like the real world' and more like 'how do we make it fun so people buy it'. VWs are supposed to be fun (hence the alt term "sandbox game") not realistic. The real world is fucking boring.
Re:FITD vs DITF (Score:3, Informative)
If the media and schooling system are trying to brainwash us, they are doing a pretty poor job. Interracial marriages are still under 10% of the total in the US. Remember that it wasn't until 1967 that the Supreme Court struck down laws prohibiting interracial marriage - so historically the establishment was used to PROHIBIT, not encourage racial mixing.
Here's a pdf of the actual article (Score:3, Informative)
Re:FITD vs DITF (Score:4, Informative)
Well, I can't disagree with what you're saying. People do use rules of thumb, and as I said, it's not always possible to know which rules of thumb are being used, if any.
However, if I were to summarize my point more succinctly, racism is a form of ignorance; or perhaps more precisely it is refractory pattern of ignorant thinking. I wouldn't call somebody a racist because they're scared of a black bum. I'd call them racist on the basis of how they justify being scared of that individual.
Racists show a pattern of intellectual impoverishment, factual carelessness, and malignant narcissism in their thinking. For example, they'd say, "My saying that bum is dangerous is not racist, because some of my best friends are black." This kind of answer shows all three patterns.
(1) Intellectual impoverishment: who the person associate with, in itself, has no logical connection to whether his opinion is justified.
(2) Factual carelessness: in most cases it is doubtful that black persons the claimant knows could really be describe as among his "best friends". The most common form factual carelessness takes is imperviousness to contrary information or facts, but this illustrates the way that "facts" are conjured or banished strictly according to need.
(3) Malignant narcissism: the person is claiming that his ideas are literally above or beyond reproach because they belong to him.
Racial bias is simply cognitive bias. Cognitive biases have their advantages in certain situations even though they are wrong. Racism is ignorant and broken thinking.
Cognitive bias doesn't mean we're doomed to ignorance. Because we tend to have bad intuitions about, say, probability doesn't preclude our surmounting those cognitive biases and becoming statistically literate. Because we have racial bias doesn't mean we're doomed to be racists. It just means we have to put in more effort.
Re:FITD vs DITF (Score:3, Informative)
There's quite a few more in the US, actually:
(From wikipedia [wikipedia.org])
* Race - Federal: Civil Rights Act of 1964
* Ethnicity
* Religion or sect - Federal: Civil Rights Act of 1964
* Color - Federal: Civil Rights Act of 1964
* National origin - Federal: Civil Rights Act of 1964
* Age (40 and over) - Federal: Age Discrimination in Employment Act of 1967
* Sex - Federal: Equal Pay Act of 1963 & Civil Rights Act of 1964
* Familial status (Housing, cannot discriminate for having children, exception for senior housing)
* Sexual orientation (in some jurisdictions and not in others)
* Disability status - Federal: Vocational Rehabilitation and Other Rehabilitation Services of 1973 & Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990
* Veteran status - Federal Vietnam Era Veterans Readjustment Assistance Act of 1974
* Genetic Information - Federal: Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act