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As dating websites are becoming an essential part of how people meet intimate and romantic partners, it is vital to design these systems to be resistant to, or at least do not amplify, bias and discrimination. Instead, the results of our online experiment with a simulated dating website, demonstrate that popular dating website design choices, such as the user of the swipe interface (swiping in one direction to indicate a like and in the other direction to express a dislike) and match scores, resulted in people racially biases choices even when they explicitly claimed not to have considered race in their decision-making. This bias was significantly reduced when the order of information presentation was reversed such that people first saw substantive profile information related to their explicitly-stated preferences before seeing the profile name and photo. These results indicate that currently-popular design choices amplify people's implicit biases in their choices of potential romantic partners, but the effects of the implicit biases can be reduced by carefully redesign the dating website interfaces.
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Race-positive Design: A Generative Approach to Decolonizing Computing
Removing racial bias from algorithms or social process is necessary, but alone it is insufficient. The “bias” framework tends to treat race as unwanted noise; best when suppressed or eliminated. This attitude extends to classrooms, where an attempt to be “colorblind” leads to what Pollock calls “colormute”; fearful of even mentioning race. Just as feminists developed “sex-positive feminism” in the 1970s, we now need race-positive design. Thinking about race as positive presence—as cultural capital; histories of resistance; bindings between lands and peoples—can be a generative force in computing development. Here we detail the application and assessment of African fractals, Native American bio-computation; urban artisanal cyborgs and other hybrid forms in which race-positive technology design can make important contributions. These include community-based CS education; computational support for sustainable architecture; unalienated labor in human-machine collaboration, and other forms of generative justice.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1930072
- PAR ID:
- 10182458
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Human factors in computing systems
- ISSN:
- 1062-9432
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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