Interracial Contact in Virtual Reality: Best Practices

Interracial interactions are occurring more frequently in virtual reality (VR) environments (e.g., multiplayer games, virtual classrooms, medical appointments). Individuals bring their biases and prejudices with them as they enter virtual spaces. Drawing from theories of real-world interracial interaction, predictable affective, cognitive, and behavioral processes undermine the quality of live interracial interactions. Emerging research using VR suggests that these same challenges occur in virtual social interactions. These challenges can be addressed using evidence-based best practices and policy recommendations: Improving racial/ethnic representation in VR, regulating codes of conduct, ensuring transparency about privacy/consent, and reducing explicit and implicit racist behavior. Following these recommendations can improve VR interracial contact and, in turn, real-world interracial interactions. While VR can serve as a unique tool to bring people together, carefully considered policies must mitigate the negative effects of racial bias that can hinder the progress of improved interracial interactions.

What to Do? Predicting Coping Strategies Following Ingroup Members’ Stereotypical Behaviors in Interracial Interactions

The current studies examine how witnessing stereotype-confirming ingroup behavior affects black Americans’ interactions with white Americans. Across three studies, black Americans indicated metaperceptual, emotional, and behavioral responses to witnessing a black person’s stereotypically negative, stereotypically positive, or nonstereotypically neutral behavior during an interracial (vs. intraracial) interaction. Following an ingroup member’s stereotypically negative (vs. stereotypically positive in Study 1, or nonstereotypically neutral in Studies 2–3) behavior during an interracial interaction, black Americans expressed greater metastereotypes, which increased intergroup anxiety, ultimately eliciting nuanced coping strategies: engagement/overcompensation, antagonism, freezing, or avoidance. Psychological resources attenuated anxiety’s effect on engagement/overcompensation (Studies 2–3) and freezing (Study 3). Both patterns were stronger in interracial (vs. intraracial) interactions (Study 3). This research demonstrates the central role of metaperceptions in interracial interactions, highlighting how stereotypically negative behaviors of nearby ingroup members are impactful situational stressors that affect behavioral intentions in intergroup encounters.

Biased, aware, and threatened: Reducing bias-aware Whites' intergroup concerns through a moral affirmation

Previous research shows that White individuals who are more aware of their propensity to express subtle racial bias experience heightened interracial anxiety. We propose that this anxiety may be a result of a moral deficit, resulting from bias awareness. In the present research, we examined whether framing bias awareness as reflecting moral versus personal insight, would moderate the relation between bias awareness and the tendency to feel anxious and avoidant of interracial interactions. Specifically, we investigated whether the framing of bias awareness would influence highly bias-aware White individuals’ (a) learning and performance orientations toward an ostensible online interaction with a Black person, (b) anticipated anxiety about interracial interactions, and (c) desire for interracial contact with outgroup members. Findings suggest that by framing bias awareness as a moral asset, we can increase people’s desire to learn about interracial interaction partners, alleviate their anxiety, and increase their desire for interracial contact.

Urban Church Imagined

Drawing on nearly two years of ethnographic data and 55 qualitative interviews, this book examines the ways in which race, class, gender, and consumption intersect with an urban context to shape the goals, identity, and experiences of a new religious congregation in Chicago. Downtown Church wants to be a church “of” and “for” the city, and wants to accomplish that goal by developing a membership that is young, trendy, sophisticated, and racially diverse. Consequently, the urban environment fosters a particular set of expectations about both cultural consumption and racial diversity—a “racialized urban imaginary”—that shapes the congregation and its self-identity. This imaginary also situates the relationship between race and place as a motivating factor for the types of interracial interaction experienced within this urban-based congregation. Church leaders and congregants negotiate between their imagined ideas of what a church in the city should look like and the structures of inclusion and exclusion these imaginaries help create and recreate. In particular, two notable organizational practices flow from the imaginary. The first, “managed diversity,” is the leadership’s attempt to attract a diverse membership, but keep it within a balance among the groups represented. The second, “racial utility,” involves the conscious and often strategic use of racial identity, by both the leadership and the membership, to accomplish their goals. This work contributes to the growing constellation of studies on urban religious organizations and multiracial congregations, as well as the emerging scholarship on intersectionality and congregational characteristics in American religious life.

National Show Town

This chapter examines the massive demographic and spatial changes that reordered Washington’s racial geography in the decades between disfranchisement in 1878 and the election of Woodrow Wilson to the presidency in 1912. As the federal government expanded and real estate boomed, the city burst its bounds and extended far beyond the central core. Driven by real estate developers, urban planners, and congressional leaders who could act without local democratic accountability, the city became a “national show town” featuring a monumental core of federal buildings and monuments. Its residents spread out into surrounding neighborhoods that were increasingly segregated by race and class, as exclusive suburban enclaves put physical and psychological distance between wealthy white Washingtonians and the masses of poor residents, black and white. Without the pull of integrated politics to promote interracial interaction, life in Washington became more segregated than ever before.

Self-Disclosure, Culture and Situational Influence: An Analysis of Interracial Interaction

Diversity is continuously growing throughout college campuses which influence interactions between students from all different backgrounds. Researchers of this study chose to investigate how individuals communicate with those of different racial backgrounds. Specifically, this study explored the communication strategies used during interracial interactions. Participants of the study attend a private faith-based institution, in the Midwestern area of the United States. This study focuses on an individual’s willingness to learn and teach, preferred level of self-disclosure, and communication accommodation as it relates to how one communicates during interracial interaction. Overall, findings revealed individuals are generally comfortable interacting with those of a different cultural background; however, different situations can play a part in how individuals communicate with one another.

Recalibrating valence-weighting tendencies as a means of reducing anticipated discomfort with an interracial interaction

We utilized a general intervention that affects (through “recalibration”) the way people generalize negative associations when evaluating objects to promote less negative expectations about an interaction with a Black Internet “chat” partner. During this intervention, participants played a game to learn which “beans” varying in shape and speckles increased or decreased their points. Participants later classified game beans and new beans as good or bad. Recalibration condition participants were told whether they classified beans correctly, thus receiving feedback regarding the appropriate weighting of resemblance to a known positive versus negative object. Control participants, who received no feedback, were more likely to classify new beans as negative than recalibration participants. Compared to control, the recalibration condition also anticipated feeling less intergroup anxiety during a chat with a Black partner (Experiments 1 and 2) and this effect was strongest among participants who reported fewer close interactions with Black people (Experiment 2).

“Poor Whites” on the Peripheries

This chapter explores socioeconomic interactions between “Poor Whites” or “Redlegs” and Afro-Barbadians as interpreted through material culture and a particular reading of a Barbadian plantation landscape. The tenantry of Below Cliff, now shrouded in dense forest, is located on the “rab” land or marginal zone of Clifton Hall plantation deemed unsuitable for large-scale agricultural production. Despite the marginality of the space in terms of plantation production and a perceived socioeconomic isolation of island “poor whites” in general, Below Cliff was a space of heightened interracial interaction. I argue that such seemingly marginal spaces (as well as the people who inhabit them) are significant arenas through which to explore the dynamic and nuanced race relations that play out in everyday life on and around the plantation. While plantation slavery was crucial in the development of modern racial ideologies and hierarchies, including attempts to rigidly impose and police racial boundaries, archaeological evidence suggests that on the local level these boundaries were exceedingly porous.

Examining the Effects of I-Sharing for Future White-Black Interactions

Research shows that I-sharing, or sharing subjective experiences with an outgroup member, positively shapes attitudes toward that outgroup member. We investigated whether this type of social experience would also promote a positive interracial interaction with a novel outgroup member. Results showed that White and Black participants who I-shared with a racial outgroup member (vs. I-sharing with a racial ingroup member) expressed more liking toward that outgroup member. However, I-sharing with an outgroup member did not reduce anxious behavior in a future social interaction with a novel racial outgroup member. Therefore, although sharing subjective experiences may increase liking toward one individual from a racial outgroup, it remains to be seen whether this positive experience can influence behaviors in future interactions with other racial outgroup members. Future directions are discussed.