“Fair Play”: A Videogame Designed to Address Implicit Race Bias Through Active Perspective Taking

Abstract

Objective: Having diverse faculty in academic health centers will help diversify the healthcare workforce and reduce health disparities. Implicit race bias is one factor that contributes to the underrepresentation of Black faculty. We designed the videogame ''Fair Play'' in which players assume the role of a Black graduate student named Jamal Davis. As Jamal, players experience subtle race bias while completing ''quests'' to obtain a science degree. We hypothesized that participants randomly assigned to play the game would have greater empathy for Jamal and lower implicit race bias than participants randomized to read narrative text describing Jamal's experience. Materials and Methods: University of Wisconsin-Madison graduate students were recruited via e-mail and randomly assigned to play ''Fair Play'' or read narrative text through an online link. Upon completion, participants took an Implicit Association Test to measure implicit bias and answered survey questions assessing empathy toward Jamal and awareness of bias. Results: As hypothesized, gameplayers showed the least implicit bias but only when they also showed high empathy for Jamal (P = 0.013). Gameplayers did not show greater empathy than text readers, and women in the text condition reported the greatest empathy for Jamal (P = 0.008). However, high empathy only predicted lower levels of implicit bias among those who actively took Jamal's perspective through gameplay (P = 0.014). Conclusions: A videogame in which players experience subtle race bias as a Black graduate student has the potential to reduce implicit bias, possibly because of a game's ability to foster empathy through active perspective taking.

Mental Disorders are Not Real: Using Skepticism and Critical Thinking to Challenge Key Myths in the Science of Mental Health

“…"), distrust (e.g., "I think those labels are just excuses"), prejudice (e.g., "I won't associate with crazies like her"), minimization (e.g., "it's a waste of time and energy to consider those things"), illegitimacy (e.g., "psychology isn't a real science like chemistry or physics"), disbelief (e.g., "they just act that way for attention"), antipathy/apathy (e.g., "they need to pull it together, they've got it no harder than everyone else") and possibly even fear (e.g., "that neighbor seems disturbed, maybe he's dangerous"). For many laypeople, these and other similar results from active perspective-taking and exposure [2].…”

Putting Ourselves in Another’s Skin: Using the Plasticity of Self-Perception to Enhance Empathy and Decrease Prejudice

“…In addition, Marini, Rubichi, and Sartori (2012) found that imagining one's self being helped by an outgroup improved participant's attitudes towards that out-group whereas imaging another person being helped did not. Another recent study demonstrated that actively taking the perspective of a black character who experienced racial bias in a computer game led to a greater reduction in implicit racial bias than merely reading the about the same experience through text did (Gutierrez et al, 2014). It should be noted, however, that Lai et al (2014) found no evidence that perspective taking of an out-group member led to reduced bias towards that out-group.…”

“…This fact may be explained by the fact that in their study the method of perspective taking used was relatively basic consisting of simply seeing a person's face and a short sentence about them. In contrast, the more successful instances of perspective taking tend to involve more immersive techniques such as writing a short essay from the other's perspective (Galinsky & Ku, 2004;Todd & Burgmer, 2013), writing their views about a film clip featuring an out-group member (Shih et al, 2009) or taking the role of an out-group member in a computer game (Gutierrez et al, 2014).…”

Investigating the Effects of a Persuasive Digital Game on Immersion, Identification, and Willingness to Help

“…Although strong effects of persuasive games have been found in some studies (Kampf & Cuhadar, 2014;Peng et al, 2010;Ruggiero, 2015), weaker effects have been found in other studies (Barthel, 2013;Gutierrez et al, 2014;Jacobs, 2016;Soekarjo & Van Oostendorp, 2015). Ultimately, however, there are too few empirical studies to derive conclusions on the genre as a whole.…”