Melissa Sands - Using Public Video Feeds to Understand Intergroup Exposure
Melissa Sands, Assistant Professor of Political Science, UC Merced
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, and how these interactions vary across different types of neighborhoods. By measuring the distance that 4,673 pedestrians maintain between individuals of other racial groups, we generate an unobtrusive, large-scale measure of inter-group racial avoidance. We find that, on average, pedestrians give a wider berth to black confederates, as compared to white non-Hispanic confederates, and that this tendency is more pronounced in a homogeneously white neighborhood than in a racially heterogeneous neighborhood. Finally, we show that this result is primarily driven by white pedestrians avoiding black confederates.
Melissa Sands is a social scientist studying the consequences of context on political and civic behavior. Her research shows that who and what we encounter as we go about our everyday lives affects the policies we support and how we interact with government. Specializing in causal inference, field experiments, and spatial and geographic analysis, she develops new approaches to the study of social and physical context.