3 ms·

As far as I can tell, the study only looks for "black" and "not black", which seems pretty narrow, no?

yamtaddle 4y ago
> When subsetting to non-Black pedestrians, who make up 93% of our sample, our results do not meaningfully change. Huh. Not... quite what I think most people would expect to find in the paper, from the headline and abstract. Am I reading that right? Black pedestrians behaved similarly to non-black pedestrians, as far as staying farther from a young black man standing on the sidewalk, than from a young white man doing the same? Or have I misunderstood?
- faeriechangling 4y ago
  Look at figure S21, "results don't meaningfully change" can be a result of an effect not existing, or a result of the authors failing to have sampled enough black people for results to meaningfully change. While sample size is low, it sure looks to me like the black population stayed closer to the black confederates than the rest of the population.
  - yamtaddle 4y ago
    Ah, yeah, wondered if that being a smaller sample size might be the cause. If the effects are actually significant, seems worth re-running with different pedestrian demographics. Could be interesting. [EDIT] Interesting, I mean, because there are a lot of dynamics that might be sussed out by this. Might find that e.g. being different from most other pedestrians enhances this effect even for pedestrians of the same race as the confederate, or any number of other quirky effects (or the opposite, or none of that! Who knows?). Or that under certain circumstances, the effect vanishes. Lots to play with, here. They call out a bunch of other studies in the paper, but it'd be cool to see the same study run several times in very-different locations.
sublinear 4y ago
It's even worse than that since the experiment is based on appearance, but claims it's about race, and race is a social construct. The labels "black" and "white" in the western world are practically meaningless today. "Mixed-race" people are increasingly common, or at least recognized, and the phenotypes associated with "white" and "black" have always been present in people around the world without necessarily having much if any European or African ancestry. EDIT: and similar to what another comment said, this ignores all other notions of "race" besides "black" and "not black"

> When subsetting to non-Black pedestrians, who make up 93% of our sample, our results do not meaningfully change. Huh. Not... quite what I think most people would expect to find in the paper, from the headline and abstract. Am I reading that right? Black pedestrians behaved similarly to non-black pedestrians, as far as staying farther from a young black man standing on the sidewalk, than from a young white man doing the same? Or have I misunderstood?

faeriechangling 4y ago
Look at figure S21, "results don't meaningfully change" can be a result of an effect not existing, or a result of the authors failing to have sampled enough black people for results to meaningfully change. While sample size is low, it sure looks to me like the black population stayed closer to the black confederates than the rest of the population.
- yamtaddle 4y ago
  Ah, yeah, wondered if that being a smaller sample size might be the cause. If the effects are actually significant, seems worth re-running with different pedestrian demographics. Could be interesting. [EDIT] Interesting, I mean, because there are a lot of dynamics that might be sussed out by this. Might find that e.g. being different from most other pedestrians enhances this effect even for pedestrians of the same race as the confederate, or any number of other quirky effects (or the opposite, or none of that! Who knows?). Or that under certain circumstances, the effect vanishes. Lots to play with, here. They call out a bunch of other studies in the paper, but it'd be cool to see the same study run several times in very-different locations.

sublinear 4y ago

It's even worse than that since the experiment is based on appearance, but claims it's about race, and race is a social construct. The labels "black" and "white" in the western world are practically meaningless today. "Mixed-race" people are increasingly common, or at least recognized, and the phenotypes associated with "white" and "black" have always been present in people around the world without necessarily having much if any European or African ancestry. EDIT: and similar to what another comment said, this ignores all other notions of "race" besides "black" and "not black"