{"id":23,"date":"2008-04-07T16:19:31","date_gmt":"2008-04-07T21:19:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/games\/2008\/04\/07\/the-police-officers-dilemma-the-raciall"},"modified":"2013-09-26T14:41:14","modified_gmt":"2013-09-26T19:41:14","slug":"the-police-officers-dilemma-the-racially-enhanced-shooter","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/games\/2008\/04\/07\/the-police-officers-dilemma-the-racially-enhanced-shooter\/","title":{"rendered":"The Police Officer&#8217;s Dilemma: the racially-enhanced shooter?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/magazine.uchicago.edu\/0778\/investigations\/images\/story2.jpg\" alt=\"Should I shoot this guy?\" align=\"right\" \/>The University of Chicago&#8217;s Joshua Correll has created a basic first-person shooter to advance his research into how race influences life-and-death decisions like <a href=\"http:\/\/home.uchicago.edu\/~jcorrell\/TPOD.html\">a policeman&#8217;s decision to shoot a potentially threatening subject<\/a>. (Thanks to Nicholas Kristof for <a href=\"http:\/\/kristof.blogs.nytimes.com\/2008\/04\/05\/unconscious-attitudes-on-race-and-gender\/\">spreading the word<\/a>).<\/p>\n<p>&gt; <a href=\"http:\/\/backhand.uchicago.edu\/Center\/ShooterEffect\/\">Play the game now.<\/a> &lt;<\/p>\n<p><strong>My score:<\/strong><br \/>\n<code>Game Over<br \/>\nYour Score:  610<br \/>\nAverage reaction time:<br \/>\nBlack Armed:644.76ms<br \/>\nBlack Unarmed:839.96ms<br \/>\nWhite Armed:661.56ms<br \/>\nWhite Unarmed:765.72ms<\/code><\/p>\n<p>That&#8217;s it. Cold, hard evidence that I am, as Avenue Q puts it, &#8220;<a href=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=x9CSnlb-ymA\">a little bit racist<\/a>&#8220;: I shot armed black men 21 ms faster than armed white men, and holstered my gun 73 ms faster for unarmed white than black men. For whatever reason, the game didn&#8217;t report back on my false positives, though I think the one person I&#8217;d shot incorrectly was black. And this is despite my going in knowing exactly what this game was intending to demonstrate!<\/p>\n<p>While I&#8217;m not qualified to delve into the psychology of this test\/game, I am &#8212; as with the <a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/games\/2008\/02\/26\/the-door-game-a-lesson-in-irrationality\/\">Door Game<\/a> &#8212; curious about whether and how this game creates consequence out of choice, and then in turn offers a moment of reflection on that choice. What kind of additional framing would exploit that teachable moment &#8212; maybe, at a minimum, the ability to post a comment after seeing your results? Compare your results with others&#8217;?<\/p>\n<p>Finally, I also wonder whether this mini-game (I hesitate to call it a &#8220;casual game&#8221;) can become part of a fuller game experience. Like, maybe, a special level in S.W.A.T. V?<\/p>\n<p><em>&#8211; Gene Koo<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The University of Chicago&#8217;s Joshua Correll has created a basic first-person shooter to advance his research into how race influences life-and-death decisions like a policeman&#8217;s decision to shoot a potentially threatening subject. (Thanks to Nicholas Kristof for spreading the word). &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/games\/2008\/04\/07\/the-police-officers-dilemma-the-racially-enhanced-shooter\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1658,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[113393,2958],"tags":[13248],"class_list":["post-23","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-archival","category-theory","tag-review"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/games\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/games\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/games\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/games\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1658"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/games\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=23"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/games\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":397,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/games\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23\/revisions\/397"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/games\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/games\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/games\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}