Researchers point out that 'discrimination by color' occurs not only in races but also in robots

Racial discrimination problems are taken up largely in the United States, such as black adultery incident by white policeman is considered as "black discrimination is the cause"? A research team such as Christoph Bart Neck, who is an Associate Professor at Human Machine Interface at Canterbury University in New Zealand, showed that "people tend to discriminate not only by humans but also with robots".

Robots and racism
https://ir.canterbury.ac.nz/handle/10092/15024

We're racist towards robots, too, study finds - ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-07-24/we-are-racist-towards-robots-too-study-finds/10029548

Prior to doing this research, Bart Neck et al 's research team was wondering "many robots are colored in white". The following image is an image list when searching "robot" in Google image search at the time of article creation, but you can see that most of the robots are white color scheme. In this fact, the research team who thought that "coloring of the robot is also affected by race discrimination" decided to investigate how people respond to robots of different colors That's right.

The research team decided to use a technique called "shooting bias" to see how many people respond to robots with different colors. Shooting bias is a simple game in which the subject stood in front of the screen, "fire when the armed people are displayed" or "do not fire if unarmed people are displayed" Respond accordingly to investigate the difference in reaction. In the past studies, armed or unarmed whites or blacks were projected and tested, but in this research it has been changed to one with white (white wind) robot and black (black-like) robot appearing .

Actually collecting subjects and conducting experiments resulted in the following results. The result is equivalent to the result of displaying white and black in the past, and it seems that the same result was obtained even if analyzing the result by human type.

1: When the black robot is armed, the subject glows quickly and the probability of miss is low
2: When the black robot is unarmed, the judgment of the subject is delayed, and the probability of mistake (firing) is high
3: When a white robot is armed, the judgment is later than 1, and there is a high possibility of making a mistake (do not fire)
4: When the white robot is unarmed, judgment is earlier than 2, the possibility of mistake (firing) is lower than 2

It is said that this result is the result of being imprinted with the evaluation that "white people are excellent and blacks are inferior" due to the influence of the media. In fact, in the 1940's psychologist Kenneth Clark and Mr. Mummy Clark asked the black children to ask the "black doll or black doll which one is superior" to investigate "imprinting by media" I did it. In this experiment it is known that the majority of black children responded that "white dolls are better".

Mr. Bart Neck said, "Humanoid robots tend to be treated like many people as" living humans. "However, at the same time there is the possibility of causing various discrimination problems, It is the responsibility of the developer "and states that the issue of discrimination is also one of the issues that robot developers must consider.