"FPS" test of your implicit racial bias

[J T]

This is a study where you are tasked with shooting bad guys with guns in their hands, but not shooting good guys with wallets or cell phones in their hands.

http://psych.colorado.edu/~jclab/FPST/d ... t_v.1.html

Here are my scores from my first attempt. I think I could have performed a bit better since the mouse cursor was blocking the gun/cell in a few instances, then when I finally moved it, I misfired a couple times. I have a delayed reaction time when subjects are unarmed, so I guess I'm a bit of an itchy trigger finger. The discrepency in my reaction times between black and white suspects is very small, not likely significant, but in the direction one would expect for racial bias. In other words, I fired faster on armed black men and delayed longer on unarmed black men, but only by a few miliseconds. I imagine these are within the bounds of variability expected by chance. I also never mistakenly shot an unarmed black person, but did shoot 2 unarmed white people.

[Gunstar Green]

I'm not sure how this tests racial bias. It would be like saying I'm a misogynist because I accidentally shoot unarmed women in Lethal Enforcers. I know the rules of the "game" and I'm following those rules. I'm looking at their hands and not the person themselves.

If anything it taught me that I just have terrible reaction time and wouldn't trust myself to ever have to make a split second decision like this.

The one thing I noticed was I tended to hesitate the most when it was a small cellphone.

[pierrot]

I think I agree with Gunstar.

Results:

index.png (45.55 KiB) Viewed 1230 times

I was too slow on quite a few of them, and my reaction times were pretty slow in general. I was also only really focusing on what was in the suspect's hand. I'm not sure how there's time to infer much else about whether he's a good guy or a bad guy. The potato quality photos were no great boon to my judgement either.

Perhaps this isn't the best time or place to bring this up, but I don't feel great about the racial demographic being limited to black and white, or that all of the suspects were, apparently, male.

[marurun]

Perhaps this isn't the best time or place to bring this up, but I don't feel great about the racial demographic being limited to black and white, or that all of the suspects were, apparently, male.

If you have too many different parameters in a study, it makes it very hard to compare data and requires much higher numbers of participants.

[pierrot]

Sure, I understand why the race is represented as a binary value, to a degree, but that doesn't mean I have to be happy about it. I'm more so curious if the police training is done in this way, also.

I'm not sure that adding pictures of people who aren't male would have meant that the data would need to adjust for different genders, though. If it would, then perhaps it is equally deserving of its own study.

[Fragems]

Tried it out twice to see if I could top your score . Not much of a difference in reaction time really and the only consistent error was being shot by armed "black" men.

[mjmjr25]

I'll do this when i'm back from my vision quest, man.

[Gunstar Green]

I'm not sure that adding pictures of people who aren't male would have meant that the data would need to adjust for different genders, though. If it would, then perhaps it is equally deserving of its own study.

I think it would be better as a separate study, yes.

[J T]

I'm not sure how this tests racial bias.

It's based somewhat on the IAT (Implicit Association Test), which was developed by one of the professors I know at the University of Washington. The basic idea is that when you have to pair responses to stimuli that are incongruent with stereotypes, it slows down your reaction time because you have to use cognitive resources to alter your behavior against your implicit bias.

This particular study is a bit different from an IAT, but it is working off similar assumptions. I personally didn't even consciously recognize the race of the suspects though because I was so busy focusing on what was in their hands. I think this would likely have been a more interesting test if you saw the suspects first, and then waited for them to pull something out of their pocket in a quick draw situation.

Anyway, I thought this was still an interesting study idea and it's fun to be a participant in, so I posted it. Since we are gamers, we'll probably perform with higher reaction times and accuracy than typical people. I got this from my wife, and a friend of hers posted it on facebook. Most of them don't play games. I know it's not a competition, but I got the high score by a long shot.

[Ack]

First, I took it last night. I was slightly faster at identifying handguns for black men(within 10 ms difference), though I was also much more likely to incorrectly think they were holding cellphones, so I suppose that means I'm more willing to give the benefit of the doubt to them too. For unarmed folks, it was about dead even in every regard.

Second, I don't like the implication that all people holding guns are automatically "evil" and must be killed. No context is applied, so for all I know I've been killing citizens who are only using their civil liberties. Considering that one of the black men recently shot was in fact reaching for his permit to present legal proof at the time when the officer shot him, I find this to be of questionable taste.

Third, I also take issue with the name "FPS." As someone who is a fan of FPS and who spent many years being regularly bullied, harassed, unfairly mistreated, and regularly accused of being a potential school shooter, I find this association personally offensive.

Fourth, JT is racist.

That is all.