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Seeing racial avoidance on New York City streets

Nature Human Behaviour volume 7, pages 1275–1281 (2023)Cite this article

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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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Fig. 1: Experiment set-up and example tracking images.
Fig. 2: Pedestrians give a wider berth to Black confederates.

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Data availability

All data necessary to replicate the analyses and figures in this paper and supporting information are available at https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataset.xhtml?persistentId=doi:10.7910/DVN/Y9QEUK.

Code availability

All code necessary to replicate the analyses and figures in this paper and supporting information are available at https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataset.xhtml?persistentId=doi:10.7910/DVN/Y9QEUK. R (open source, version 4.1.0) was used for data analysis.

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Acknowledgements

We are grateful to J. Anastasopoulos, D. Carpenter, M. Craig, D. de Kadt, R. Enos, J. Grimmer, M. Hibbing, H. Jefferson, G. King, A. Theodoridis, C. Wong and audiences at the American Political Science Association annual meeting, the Midwest Political Science Association annual meeting, the New York University Center for Experimental Social Science conference, Stanford University, the University of California, Riverside, the University of California, Berkeley and the University of Iowa for helpful feedback. The authors received no specific funding for this work.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Political Science, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, USA

    Bryce J. Dietrich

  2. Department of Government, London School of Economics and Political Science, London, UK

    Melissa L. Sands

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B.J.D. and M.L.S. contributed equally to the authorship of this manuscript.

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Correspondence to Bryce J. Dietrich or Melissa L. Sands.

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Supplementary Figs. 1–21, discussion and Tables 1–8.

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Dietrich, B.J., Sands, M.L. Seeing racial avoidance on New York City streets. Nat Hum Behav 7, 1275–1281 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-023-01589-7

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