Some People Really Are Race-Blind

[NewWorldViking]

Watch this short video, it's on a very interesting experiment about short-term memory. Two people are talking on the street and one person gets swapped in the middle of the conversation and half the time the other person doesn't even notice.

Berred Brown - person swap

At one point an Asian lady is swapped for a White woman and the subject doesn't notice! At the end a black guy is swapped for a White guy and the subject doesn't notice the difference?!?

So some individuals are indoctrinated to such an extent that they don't even... omg.

Does anybody have any thoughts on this?

[Thusnelda]

Are you sure that this video isn´t just made up? I can´t believe that people don´t memorize that they´ve started to talk with a White person some seconds ago.

[Northern Paladin]

Are you sure that this video isn´t just made up? I can´t believe that people don´t memorize that they´ve started to talk with a White person some seconds ago.

This is real, and is actually quite common. I remember learning about this in psychology class. We were shown a similar experiment in which as much as 75% of the time the people did not notice a subtle differences in the individuals.

The subjects in this experiment were 1) kind of startled, and 2) focusing on giving the person the right directions, all the while trying make a good impression on the other person. In short, their focus was simply somewhere else.

Some of the people in the clip were clearly not even paying attention to the person asking for directions. Most of their attention was focused on the map, and on the direction in which they were pointing.

I'm actually thinking about trying a similar experiment on one of my friends.

[velvet]

Does anybody have any thoughts on this?

Two things at play here, one, people are teached not to pay attention to skin-color, so the general awareness is not there for this kind of thing, although I assume in that sort of test it really plays not so big of a role.

The bigger thing at play here is the general inattentiveness to random people on the street asking random questions when you're actually busy with something else (either with yourself or the one(s) walking with you, or maybe you want to get your bus, whatever). In fact, you could swap the "object" to a green alien and people wouldnt notice.

It's not so much "color blindness", but a general detail-blindness, THE big problem for police looking for witnesses. People tend to realise only parts of a scene, even when they're told (in other tests) to pay attention to something shown to them and afterwards tell details. I've seen tests with people talking and another person dancing around in the background, and while the observers could recall parts of the convo and some even some (not all, never) details of the clothing (not rarely with mixed-up colors of the shirt/tie whatever), none of them had noticed the dancing person in the background.

People view selective. And this selectivity depends, among other things, on expectations (and expectations drawn from conventions). You simply dont expect the person you're talking to being swapped for someone else, continuing the convo like nothing had happened. The human brain cannot really deal with that so quickly, and as said, it's a random situation where people dont pay much attention anyway.

You can observe that detail blindness in other situations as well, for example when a new road sign is placed somewhere, with maybe a speed limitation that wasnt there before. You'll experience people who'll swear there is none, although they drive by it already for months. The brain knows there never was one, and it doesnt process the change.

In other settings this could happen to you just as well, but "we" here at Skadi ARE race-conscious, so we learned / teached ourselves to pay general attention to the ethnicity of anyone we see, so I guess we all would notice if the white person we're talking to suddenly is swapped for a black, since we wouldnt maybe talk to blacks but simply go on when a black person would ask us something. We certainly wouldnt notice if the person we're talking to is swapped for another person of the same racial makeup though.

Human Perception - and its limits - is a quite interesting and complex topic, I wouldnt really interprete too much into that test above though.

[Þoreiðar]

I think most of the people just want to avoid the akward situation of abruptly halting the conversation and asking the other person if they are the same person they talked to half a second ago.

By the instinctual judgement of the subject of the experiment, such an unnatural development of the situation is in no way a conceivable eventuality of such a setting, and therefore outside the frames of one's preception of reality. Openly failing to conform to such a fundamental consensus of reality would in most eventualities contribute to 'losing face' (that is; appearing unaccountable), and ultimately lessen one's state of trust within one's 'social circle' - or tribe, in an evolutionary context. Without that elementary trust, one would face the threat of being frozen out by the group and lose one's social standing. Quite simply, it is not worth the risk.

If the setting was different, where the correct identification of the other party could effect one's safety or welfare, I think the experiment would yeld a little bit different results, as the risk/reward ratio evens out.

Some people really just are lousy at registering and remembering facial characteristics, but I don't believe that can account for the examples where the other party was swapped by someone with a different gender or race altogether. In my opinion, this experiment says more about evolutionary grounded social mechanisms than people's actual ability to recognise faces.

[GeistFaust]

There is no doubt people are blind to race. We have been taught and indoctrinated to be so from a young age so as to not be offensive. This whole mentality which tries to teach us not to be offensive in my opinion is offensive. Not classifying and categorizing people subconsciously by race is a form of racism.

Its unfortunate the race consciousness is becoming such a taboo thing which people like to evade and ignore in their ordinary day to day life. I think this video takes things out of context and blows them out of proportion, but that is sometimes what is needed to get a point across to someone psychologically.

I think people are subconsciously racist in a sense they just suppress and repress it and pretend to not be that way. Its all just a part of the superficial spirit which has been spread around the world by the materialistic whore called America. You can say something slightly racist and people will take it out of context and attack you personally.

[VedicViking]

I don’t think there’s anything sinister going on. People’s brains are such that they will often distort memories so as to make more sense.

I doubt this experiment would work in a town or country that’s almost entirely mono-ethnic though.