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Seeing racial avoidance on New York City streets
Journal article   Open access   Peer reviewed

Seeing racial avoidance on New York City streets

Bryce J Dietrich and Melissa L Sands
Nature human behaviour, Vol.7(8), pp.1275-1281
08/2023
DOI: 10.1038/s41562-023-01589-7
PMID: 37142689
url
https://researchonline.lse.ac.uk/id/eprint/118810/1/NatureHB_main_formatted_BD_edits.pdfView
Open Access

Abstract

Here, using publicly available traffic camera feeds in combination with a real-world field experiment, we examine how pedestrians of different races behave in the presence of racial out-group members. Across two different New York City neighbourhoods and 3,552 pedestrians, we generate an unobtrusive, large-scale measure of inter-group racial avoidance by measuring the distance individuals maintain between themselves and other racial groups. We find that, on average, pedestrians in our sample (93% of whom were phenotypically non-Black) give a wider berth to Black confederates, as compared with white non-Hispanic confederates.

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