3 ms·

What if you're measuring reactions to appearance?

sublinear 3y ago
The paper's title says "racial avoidance" and the paper itself claims to be about race. EDIT: unable to reply to your reply since it seems we have reached the maximum depth of this thread, but have you considered that judging race by appearance is... racist (and unreliable)?
- yamtaddle 3y ago
  If your concern is that the researchers failed at picking confederates whose race, judged by appearance, would be interpreted the way the researchers expected it to be, close enough to 100% of the time to not have affected the outcome... I very much doubt they failed in that way. If that's not your concern, then I've lost track of what your complaint is. [EDIT] Reply to your edit: Yes, that's... the point? [EDIT AGAIN] Wait, are you saying that it's racist for the researchers to categorize pedestrians' races based on appearance? If so, I'd regard that objection as specious. That's not racist. Having-to-do-with-race isn't what racism is. It could be inaccurate (or not!) but it's not racist. In any event, it seems they didn't actually measure a difference in reaction of pedestrians based on their own race (!) so it may not be relevant anyway.
  - sublinear 3y ago
    > are you saying that it's racist for the researchers to categorize pedestrians' races based on appearance? Yes. I thought that was obvious from the first comment I made. Sorry if I wasn't more clear. > it may not be relevant anyway My main complaint was the lack of scientific rigor. It's relevant in other ways because of this.
  - dragonwriter 3y ago
    > If your concern is that the researchers failed at picking confederates whose race, judged by appearance, would be interpreted the way the researchers expected it to be, close enough to 100% of the time to not have affected the outcome… I very much doubt they failed in that way. That’s a legitimate concern since the methodology on how “racial phenotypes” of “Black” and “non-Hispanic White” were identified for the confederate pairs is not identified. We know their assessment of the race of the subjects whose behavior is studied is measurably lower than 100%, because they actually have reliability data on that by comparison with a second rater.

The paper's title says "racial avoidance" and the paper itself claims to be about race. EDIT: unable to reply to your reply since it seems we have reached the maximum depth of this thread, but have you considered that judging race by appearance is... racist (and unreliable)?

yamtaddle 3y ago
If your concern is that the researchers failed at picking confederates whose race, judged by appearance, would be interpreted the way the researchers expected it to be, close enough to 100% of the time to not have affected the outcome... I very much doubt they failed in that way. If that's not your concern, then I've lost track of what your complaint is. [EDIT] Reply to your edit: Yes, that's... the point? [EDIT AGAIN] Wait, are you saying that it's racist for the researchers to categorize pedestrians' races based on appearance? If so, I'd regard that objection as specious. That's not racist. Having-to-do-with-race isn't what racism is. It could be inaccurate (or not!) but it's not racist. In any event, it seems they didn't actually measure a difference in reaction of pedestrians based on their own race (!) so it may not be relevant anyway.
- sublinear 3y ago
  > are you saying that it's racist for the researchers to categorize pedestrians' races based on appearance? Yes. I thought that was obvious from the first comment I made. Sorry if I wasn't more clear. > it may not be relevant anyway My main complaint was the lack of scientific rigor. It's relevant in other ways because of this.
- dragonwriter 3y ago
  > If your concern is that the researchers failed at picking confederates whose race, judged by appearance, would be interpreted the way the researchers expected it to be, close enough to 100% of the time to not have affected the outcome… I very much doubt they failed in that way. That’s a legitimate concern since the methodology on how “racial phenotypes” of “Black” and “non-Hispanic White” were identified for the confederate pairs is not identified. We know their assessment of the race of the subjects whose behavior is studied is measurably lower than 100%, because they actually have reliability data on that by comparison with a second rater.