The colour Purple

Further to my previous post on the Turban effect, we now have researchers that find racism translates to virtual worlds as well.

STOP THE PRESS! Racism exists in the real world and gasp, shock-horror, it also exists in the virtual world.

Why this should be a surprise, as if the interface of a computer, mouse and keyboard can somehow make an unpleasant aspect of human nature vanish, is beyond me.

You will find racism online, in fact you will find every -ism under the sun in cyberspace (sexism, communism, islamism, botulism, etc..) and weirdly enough, for a man-made venture, online games will also have their fair share of isms brought over from the real world.

To sum up the "research", the authors contrived a social manipulation scenario in an onine forum, where people control avatars, human-like characters that can interact with other characters. The details involve 'manipulating' people to do favours, and then seeing if they will do one further favour, all done in the online world. They found that if the researchers asked for favours when they were 'driving' white-skinned avatars, they were 20% more likely to get a positive response when asking for a second favour, than if they were 'driving' black-skinned avatars.

So does that mean there's 20% racism in this online world?

From the article:

The researchers added a second layer on top of these two methods of manipulation by using avatars with skin tones set at the two extremes of light and dark that the environment, There.com, allows. This let them check for whether another pervasive social influence, racism, holds sway in the virtual world. "

Other than the sheer folly of "proving" a real-world phenomena in a virtual world, what really gets my goat is that these "researchers" prove their preconceived agenda with their awesome social science skillz, adding to the meme that Americans are racist.

The media has been very busy setting up the narrative that should Obama lose, it will be because of racism. Research such as this has one purpose only: to prove how bad (racist) the white man is. It must be remembered that the only form of racism on Earth, is the white man's prejudice against the others. Any other form of "racism" is simply evidence of your cultural insensitivity.

"The authors don't seem to know whether to celebrate the finding, since it opens up new avenues for pursuing social research, or to condemn the fact that racism has been dragged from the real to virtual worlds."

A cast picture from There.com. If you like anyone other than the
two darker-skinned homosexuals standing behind the couch, then you're a racist.