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The current study examines the effect of sleep deprivation and caffeine use on racial bias in the decision to shoot. Participants deprived of sleep for 24 hr (vs. rested participants) made more errors in a shooting task and were more likely to shoot unarmed targets. A diffusion decision model analysis revealed sleep deprivation decreased participants’ ability to extract information from the stimuli, whereas caffeine impacted the threshold separation, reflecting decreased caution. Neither sleep deprivation nor caffeine moderated anti-Black racial bias in shooting decisions or at the process level. We discuss how our results clarify discrepancies in past work testing the impact of fatigue on racial bias in shooting decisions.
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This content will become publicly available on January 1, 2026
Seeing Identity in Data: Can Anthropographics Uncover Racial Homophily in Emotional Responses?
Racial homophily refers to the tendency of individuals to associate with others of the same racial or ethnic background. A recent study found no evidence of racial homophily in responses to mass shooting data visualizations. To increase the likelihood of detecting an effect, we redesigned the experiment by replacing bar charts with anthropographics and expanding the sample size. In a crowdsourced study (N=720), we showed participants a pictograph of mass shooting victims in the United States, with victims from one of three racial groups (Hispanic, Black, or White) highlighted. Each participant was assigned a visualization highlighting either their own racial group or a different racial group, allowing us to assess the influence of racial concordance on changes in affect (emotion). We found that, across all conditions, racial concordance had a modest but significant effect on changes in affect, with participants experiencing greater negative affect change when viewing visualizations highlighting their own race. This study provides initial evidence that racial homophily can emerge in responses to data visualizations, particularly when using anthropographics.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1953135
- PAR ID:
- 10615066
- Publisher / Repository:
- The Eurographics Association
- Date Published:
- ISSN:
- 1727-5296
- Subject(s) / Keyword(s):
- CCS Concepts: Human-centered computing → Empirical studies in visualization Human centered computing → Empirical studies in visualization
- Format(s):
- Medium: X Size: 5 pages
- Size(s):
- 5 pages
- Right(s):
- Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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