Tuesday, December 10, 2002

With Video Games, Researchers Link Guns to Stereotypes

Asked to make split-second decisions about whether black or white male figures in a video game were holding guns, people were more likely to conclude mistakenly that the black men were armed and to shoot them, a series of new studies reports.

The subjects in the studies, who were instructed to shoot only when the human targets in the game were armed, made more errors when confronted by images of black men carrying objects like cellphones or cameras than when faced with similarly unarmed white men. The participants, who in all but one study were primarily white, were also quicker to fire on black men with guns than on white men with guns.

"The threshold to decide to shoot is set lower for African-Americans than for whites," said Dr. Bernadette Park, a professor of psychology at the University of Colorado at Boulder and an author of a report on the studies to be published today in The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

The difference was not large. But the findings mesh with other research indicating that unconscious biases, possibly instilled by the news media, advertising or other cultural influences, can shape behavior, even when people do not consciously endorse such biases. Studies suggest that those hidden stereotypes or attitudes are often activated in situations where people are forced to respond quickly and automatically.…
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/10/health/psychology/10RACE.html?pagewanted=all&position=top

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