The impact of user biases toward a virtual human's skin tone on triage errors within a virtual world for emergency management training

Biases influence the decisions people make in everyday life, even if they are unaware of it. This behavior transfers into social interactions in virtual environments. These systems are becoming an increasingly common platform for training, so it is critical to understand how biases will impact them. The present study investigates the effect of the ethnicity bias on error behaviors within a virtual world for medical triage training. Two between subjects variables, participant skin tone (light, dark) and avatar skin tone (light, dark), and one within subjects variable, agent/patient skin tone (light, dark), were manipulated to create a 2 × 2 × 2 mixed design with four conditions. Effects on errors were observed on errors made while helping patient (agents). Participants made considerably more errors while triaging dark-skinned agents which increased the amount of time spent on them, in comparison to light-skinned agents. Within a virtual world for training, people apply general ethnic biases against dark-skinned individuals, which is important to consider when designing such systems because the biases could impact the effectiveness of the training.