Seeing racial avoidance on New York City streets

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-023-01589-7

by orhmeh09 • 3 years ago

20 25 3 years ago

nature.com

cpitman• 3 years ago

Looks like one of the authors has a working draft here: http://www.brycejdietrich.com/files/working_papers/dietrich_...

Workaccount2• 3 years ago

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

yamtaddle6• 3 years 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?

sublinear5• 3 years 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"

faeriechangling2• 3 years ago

Regardless of cause, it does seem that Black men in Manhattan of a certain age are avoided more by pedestrians as measured by distance than White men in Manhattan of a certain age. That sucks.

Still a few issues:

First, they clearly push the "Racial avoidance hypothesis" but Figure S21 seemed to bolster the "Pedestrian outgroup salience hypothesis" over the "Racial avoidance hypothesis" since black people didn't seem to avoid other black people. The author just seemed to brush off this hypothesis as plausible but not having enough evidence to support it while pushing the favoured racial avoidance hypothesis. Yet how can he know if his hypothesis is correct without ruling out the pedestrian outgroup hypothesis or knowing if perhaps both hypothesis are correct and contributing to the effect seen?

Second, this entire quote:

Pedestrians on our selected Manhattan street corners are likely to be wealthier, better educated, and more politically Left-leaning than the average American. These traits may, on the whole, make subjects less prone to racial avoidance.

This is directly contradicted by figure S19, which found that people gave a wider berth to black people in the wealthier upper east-side neighbourhood than the poorer midtown neighbourhood. I also should point out the bias of the author, a wealthy educated man, talking shit about how poorer less educated populations (say - black people) may be more racially avoidant.

Third, this entire quote:

One alternative interpretation of our findings is that pedestrians are “giving people space” rather than avoiding them. We reject this interpretation, and point to the literature on proxemics, which focuses on how people use space during social interactions, and demonstrates physical avoidance of stigmatized groups in a variety of contexts, linking patterns of avoidance to implicit measures of prejudice

Anyway this is based on doi: 10.1007/7854_2015_431. It mentions a study where it's specifically referring to response latency as the "implicit measure of prejudice" correlated to less eye contact, more blinking, more distancing from interviewers, more distancing from virtual moroccans, and more shooting of virtual black people.

I'm confused as to on what grounds this hypothesis was rejected. Even if you establish that the people who were distancing themselves from black's were indeed prejudiced against blacks, that doesn't prove that they're not motivated by giving them more space. Differential treatment based on race is inherently prejudicial to begin with, so this entire mode of analysis makes no sense. On top of how nonsensical this entire analysis is, it's very questionable what the linked study actually links patterns of avoidance to valid "implicit measures of prejudice", most research on implicit prejudice is very controversial.

Fourth, S5.5.2 found that females both stayed further from black confederates AND confederates in general. However since the study DIDN'T examine how far men would stay away from women confederates, we can't say if it's because they're men or because they're a different gender. Now we didn't establish this, so we shouldn't jump to any conclusions, but imagine if we just followed the lead of the authors here and jumped to the conclusion this was gender bias and said:

Avoidance experienced by MALE individuals, day in and day out, likely imposes a psychological toll... ...eroding mental and physical health. The very public, widespread, and chronic occurrence of pedestrian MALE avoidance may have spillover effects that influence others’ behavior in subtle but destructive ways. For example, law enforcement – even if trained to recognize their own implicit biases – may implicitly or explicitly detect bystander behavior and overestimate the level of threat posed by MALE Americans in ambiguous situations.

Oddly the authors didn't opt to draw this conclusion nor give any explanation as to why we shouldn't! They found a racial bias and a gender bias, piled on empathy for the former, and just totally omitted the latter, which itself reflects bias. This is beyond the prejudicial attitude that poor uneducated conservatives might be worse (but not better) than Manhattanites.

bitcurious• 3 years ago

According to Wikipedia, Staten Island has the lowest percentage of black residents, at 9.7%. NYC overall is 26.6% black. You’d have to be either pretty deliberate or pretty careless to work with a sample population of only 7% black folks.

sublinear5• 3 years ago

Ghastly. How can this possibly be published by Nature? Flawed from the start since reliably detecting "race" is more complicated than just physical appearance, yet the data is based on surveillance cameras. Also, culture may be just as if not more significant. Maybe New York just has a lot of assholes and low individualism. Also, how can a mere correlated difference of reaction be considered "racist"?

zorked2• 3 years ago

What does a pedestrian use to judge the racial group of another person if not appearence?

sublinear5• 3 years ago

Appearance is not race and this is supposed to be a scientific paper.

version_five2• 3 years ago

Ever consider that most pedestrians are not "judging the racial group" of everyone they see?

yamtaddle6• 3 years ago

They placed the people the avoidance of whom was being measured (the authors' "confederates", as the paper calls them) so they knew for a fact what those guys looked like. It seems like they also didn't include data points if they didn't think the footage was clear enough.

Maybe New York just has a lot of assholes and low individualism.

But they measured a difference between behavior around white and black "confederates".

Also, how can a mere correlated difference of reaction be considered "racist"?

It's not exactly concrete proof per se, but I think a well-constructed study of this sort (I am not prepared to vouch for this one) could at least reach a finding that points strongly in that direction.

joshuaheard• 3 years ago

I wonder if they used the traffic camera data to record the number of violent incidents to see if there was any correlation between the number of violent incidents and the amount of avoidance for each racial category.

NoImmatureAdHom• 3 years ago

This is a really stupid paper. Their effect sizes are tiny (a 3-4" deviation??). I don't care how accurately you estimated it.

Also, they don't talk about the things that are obviously driving this. It's not race per se, it's things that correlate with race. If you live in an environment where all black and non-black people have the same distributions of behavior, you won't learn to treat people differently on the basis of being black vs. non-black. It's the fact that black Americans are ~7-10x as violent[0] as non-black Americans that is driving the behavior the paper observes. Obviously. The fact that they don't touch this obvious driver makes them, in my view, cowardly, bad scientists out for a cheap thrill.

0: https://cde.ucr.cjis.gov/LATEST/webapp/#/pages/explorer/crim... 7.5x raw numbers, closer to 10x when accounting for the fact that clearance rates are lower among black offenders (i.e., black Americans get away with murder more often).

PKop• 3 years ago

Isn't the behavior just rational pattern recognition? What is the problem exactly?

tingletech• 3 years ago

This looks like the pre print http://www.brycejdietrich.com/files/working_papers/dietrich_...

Seeing racial avoidance on New York City streets

Related Stories