Seeing racial avoidance on New York City streets

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. In an experiment using publicly available New York City traffic camera feeds, Sands and Dietrich find that pedestrians tend to avoid Black men more than white non-Hispanic men by leaving more space when passing.

Automated summary

Using publicly available traffic camera feeds and a real-world field experiment, the study examines the behavior of pedestrians of different races in the presence of racial out-group members. The results show that pedestrians tend to maintain a greater distance from Black confederates compared to white non-Hispanic confederates, indicating a tendency towards racial avoidance.