Thank you to Dean Herbert, who I emailed about a month ago, for allowing me to post this thread.

Dear Osu! Players:

You are invited to participate in a web-based research study to investigate the validity of computer-based attitude inventories when given to frequent gamers (like you). We are recruiting current Osu! players. Of interest to us is how gamers will perform on measures designed to assess “implicit racial attitudes.” (These are attitudes people hold but cannot easily report on using standard self-report inventories.) Implicit racial attitudes are typically measured with computer programs that generate scores based on respondents’ ability to quickly and accurately categorize different concepts. Given that gamers have a lot of skill and experience at exactly this type of activity, we think that gamers may pose a real challenge to this measurement approach. You can help us by taking the test and doing the best you can – much like you do when you are playing games online. We admit this test will not be as much fun for you as Osu!, but your responses can help advance the science of implicit attitude measurement. If you agree to participate in this research study, you will be asked to answer questions regarding race relations in the U.S., your competitiveness and your social life. You then will be asked to complete a task designed to measure implicit racial attitudes. In all, we estimate that this study will take approximately 30 minutes to complete. As this study is web based, all study tasks can be performed via our website from your web browser. Our interest in this study is to test whether this measure "measures up" when completed by people like you -- people who react faster on computer tasks than the average person and who have better multi-tasking skills. Because we are testing validity of this measurement technique, we are not concerned with your individual attitudes nor can we give you any feedback on the meaning of your test score.

To participate in this research, visit the following link: http://surveysensei.uconn.edu

Seems like the study is targeting people who lives/lived in USA. Quoting this paragraph to save others time:

The questionnaire will ask you some basic questions about yourself, such as your age, gender, race and nationality. The questionnaire will ask you about your opinions on some current issues in the U.S.A regarding race relations. You will be asked to answer some general questions about your opinions regarding African Americans and European Americans. The questionnaire will also ask you about your lifestyle and personality style, including how many friends you have, how competitive you are, and how cooperative you are with others.

This thread has been approved.

Even tho the description is quite hard to understand, they basically want to find out, how IAT-tests are influenced by osu! experience (since IAT tests are reaction tests to measure implicit attitudes towards things,e.g. racism - quite valid, but yet I shouldn't explain them to keep the test away from valid impact)

Basically you help to improve a psychological testing method. Enjoy!

@UConnPsych Please consider, that your test might be influenced by tons of external variables that you can not keep equal. I hope you don't draw awkward conclusions out of simple correlations from this.

only 3 numbers?

Loctav wrote:

Just put 999 if you are below that.

D: too late reply sorry

Yeah, if you're only looking for Americans, (which I assume you are, since all of the cultural backgrounds are x-American) limiting the rank box to 3 digits is going to cap your potential participants at about 44.

Just put 999 if you are below that.

I think this experiment is trying to test some kind of inherent racism or racial bias. But I think it's not really a good indicator.

In the last reaction time test, the category grouping changed but I didn't even realize because my muscle memory got used to pairing "black" and "bad" together as well as "white" and "good". I think this is a really inaccurate measure of racial bias, but rather a better indicator of adaptability of muscle memory and reaction time, as you could arbitrarily switched around the category groupings to make the experiment completely random and thus have still only measured adaptability of muscle memory without saying anything about racial bias.

A lot of the time, I didn't really care about what the categories were about, only trying to get through the sets as fast as I could. Heck you could have replaced "white" and black" with "fruits" and "vegetables" and still not proven anything other than people are racist against vegetables.

What a bizarre survey. Questions like 'How do you feel about black people?' are dumb, since while a lot of people have some degree of racial bias very few will openly admit to disliking a race. That question basically asks 'Are you racist?'.

Kanye West: actually muscle memory isn't really speaking for that. Psychological studies have shown that the reaction time on pressing keys with a combination of words used on the same key binding is highly influenced on how "accessible" or salient this combination is.
Especially on first attempts during the test, it's harder to click buttons that have the binding "large/mushroom" and "tiny/tree"
The unfitting combination gets you confused and therefore your reaction time is larger than on the more salient combination (tiny/mushroom and large/tree).
Also the latter testings try to exactly measure the impact of muscle memory. The very important things are the first run-throughs.

You have an implicit binding and your cognitive categorization principle is having an high impact on how long you need to memorize the binding properly without big delay. The learning effect is slower on less salient combinations.

Mashley: most questions were manipulation checks. It is commonly known that even non-racist people are having stereotypes. This kind of questions only have the purpose to make the topic "racism" salient and therefore accessible. The actual answer is kinda irrelevant, since scientists know that you answer socially welcomed.

Don't trust psychologists. I studied psychology. I know the way they work

I have my doubts on way other variables.

Also I'd like to mention that this test shall try to find out the impact of "being practiced in reaction time tasks" on implicit association tests (IAT). That's why they look for osu! Players. It's a external factor analysis, rather than a research on how racist the osu! Community is.

I hope I don't spoil the experiment.

UConnPsych wrote:

Thank you to Dean Herbert, who I emailed about a month ago, for allowing me to post this thread.

Dear Osu! Players:

You are invited to participate in a web-based research study to investigate the validity of computer-based attitude inventories when given to frequent gamers (like you). We are recruiting current Osu! players. Of interest to us is how gamers will perform on measures designed to assess “implicit racial attitudes.” (These are attitudes people hold but cannot easily report on using standard self-report inventories.)

Implicit racial attitudes are typically measured with computer programs that generate scores based on respondents’ ability to quickly and accurately categorize different concepts. Given that gamers have a lot of skill and experience at exactly this type of activity, we think that gamers may pose a real challenge to this measurement approach. You can help us by taking the test and doing the best you can – much like you do when you are playing games online.

We admit this test will not be as much fun for you as Osu!, but your responses can help advance the science of implicit attitude measurement. If you agree to participate in this research study, you will be asked to answer questions regarding race relations in the U.S., your competitiveness and your social life. You then will be asked to complete a task designed to measure implicit racial attitudes. In all, we estimate that this study will take approximately 30 minutes to complete.

As this study is web based, all study tasks can be performed via our website from your web browser. Our interest in this study is to test whether this measure "measures up" when completed by people like you -- people who react faster on computer tasks than the average person and who have better multi-tasking skills. Because we are testing validity of this measurement technique, we are not concerned with your individual attitudes nor can we give you any feedback on the meaning of your test score.

To participate in this research, visit the following link: http://surveysensei.uconn.edu

As a psych major, I have to tell ya the huge paragraph with no bold on main thesis made me feel tired of reading 'em, and I'm pretty sure I'm not alone.

Before you ever post it here, you should be aware that the game is international, and a lot of people would find it stressful to read English in such huge paragraph without highlight, bold, paragraph break, or EVEN CAPITALIZE THE MAIN THESIS. I'm pretty sure that even native speakers would hate it.

So my quote is an example of how to make it look a lot better. A researcher in psychology can do way better than what you did.

As for the survey, I got no idea about what made you think that delivering the questions to players around the world would be a good idea. Dean Herbert, the creator of the game, is an Australian, the country with highest total domestic score is Japan, the country with the most active users is China. Are you expecting these guys to care about domestic issues in the United States of America?

Gotta say that the apparent prejudicial implications are kinda bunk--plus, a lot of the survey questions are stupid e.g. "blacks shouldn't have their business where they're not wanted" or whatever. I don't think that anybody should have their business where they're not wanted, regardless of race. I also fear that the last reaction test will give the unfair impression that people associate black/white with bad/good, when it's simply an issue of jumbling the prompts between hands. As a whole, I wonder what this thing will achieve and how accurate it'll actually be.

D33d wrote:

Gotta say that the apparent prejudicial implications are kinda bunk--plus, a lot of the survey questions are stupid e.g. "blacks shouldn't have their business where they're not wanted" or whatever. I don't think that anybody should have their business where they're not wanted, regardless of race. I also fear that the last reaction test will give the unfair impression that people associate black/white with bad/good, when it's simply an issue of jumbling the prompts between hands. As a whole, I wonder what this thing will achieve and how accurate it'll actually be.

You know what, if separating two groups of random people by, say, their eye color, then the brown-eyes would automatically be not wanted in the blue-eyes' community. Whatever difference that separates people into groups would cause discrimination.

Kinda off topic, but this phenomena is pretty interesting.

I didn't realise that we have so many psych students lol

The study probably aims at Americans because the tests are mainly used in english speaking countries and the stereotypes against black people are more salient and present there. It would be dumb to ask for stereotypes on black people in an Asian country, where almost no black people are living or where such kind of stereotypes are generally not present (there are more stereotypes of Europeans)

But agreeing with B-52. The main thesis shouldve been more visible and the formatting and presenting sucks. People unused to psychological testing procedures are unused to this kind of English and even native speakers are probably insanely bored of this wall of text.

Oinari-sama wrote:

I didn't realise that we have so many psych students lol

Psych is a pretty popular major :3. There isnt an overwhelming amount, but theyre more applicable to say "As a paych major. . ."

Ill take the survey and post my thoughys in a bit