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Video Game Shows Racial Stereotyping about Guns
Posted by Steven Wu on Tuesday, December 10 @ 11:37:06 EST Oddities
The New York Times has an article that begins:
"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 study was sparked by the 1999 shooting of Amadou Diallo. The researchers believe that this phenomenon is due less to conscious prejudice than to "unconscious biases, possibly instilled by the news media, advertising or other cultural influences" (which, incidentally, is similar to one of Michael Moore's points in his much-criticized film, Bowling for Columbine). Pretty scary.
 
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Re: Video Game Shows Racial Stereotyping about Guns (Score: 0)
by Anonymous on Wednesday, December 11 @ 01:13:36 EST
Like Chris Rock likes to say, "I'm not afraid when there's a member of the media standing behind me at the ATM."


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