What does a pedestrian use to judge the racial group of another person if not appearence?
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Ever consider that most pedestrians are not "judging the racial group" of everyone they see?
If they do so judge, however, what are they basing it on? Apparent race seems like a totally valid variable if behavior around people of apparently-different races is what you're trying to measure.
Where may I have seen a paper that contains evidence against your theory?
Impossible to remember.
Despite the cleverness of your response, I don't belive the paper has anything to say about the kind of judgements people are making. They observed stuff, they didn't read minds.
Appearance is not race and this is supposed to be a scientific paper.
What if you're measuring reactions to appearance?
The paper's title says "racial avoidance" and the paper itself claims to be about race.
EDIT: unable to reply to your reply since it seems we have reached the maximum depth of this thread, but have you considered that judging race by appearance is... racist (and unreliable)?
If your concern is that the researchers failed at picking confederates whose race, judged by appearance, would be interpreted the way the researchers expected it to be, close enough to 100% of the time to not have affected the outcome... I very much doubt they failed in that way.
If that's not your concern, then I've lost track of what your complaint is.
[EDIT] Reply to your edit: Yes, that's... the point? [EDIT AGAIN] Wait, are you saying that it's racist for the researchers to categorize pedestrians' races based on appearance? If so, I'd regard that objection as specious. That's not racist. Having-to-do-with-race isn't what racism is. It could be inaccurate (or not!) but it's not racist. In any event, it seems they didn't actually measure a difference in reaction of pedestrians based on their own race (!) so it may not be relevant anyway.
> If your concern is that the researchers failed at picking confederates whose race, judged by appearance, would be interpreted the way the researchers expected it to be, close enough to 100% of the time to not have affected the outcome… I very much doubt they failed in that way.
That’s a legitimate concern since the methodology on how “racial phenotypes” of “Black” and “non-Hispanic White” were identified for the confederate pairs is not identified. We know their assessment of the race of the subjects whose behavior is studied is measurably lower than 100%, because they actually have reliability data on that by comparison with a second rater.
> are you saying that it's racist for the researchers to categorize pedestrians' races based on appearance?
Yes. I thought that was obvious from the first comment I made. Sorry if I wasn't more clear.
> it may not be relevant anyway
My main complaint was the lack of scientific rigor. It's relevant in other ways because of this.