Scientists determine 'shooter bias' extends to black robots

An international team of researchers recently conducted a series of experiments to determine if humans are more likely to fire a weapon at a machine that's racialized as a black robot than one that looks white. Much like the doll experiments conducted by Kenneth and Mamie Clark in the 1940s, the researchers' work was designed to determine if socially inherit racial bias exists in human's perception of an object which, by its very nature, cannot actually have a race. Unfortunately, while many things have changed since then, some truly awful things haven't. In order to test how people subconsciously view racialized robots, the researchers replicated a different set of experiments designed to determine if humans have a shooting bias towards black people. They did this by presenting people with an image of a robot depicted in different colors representing human skin tones.