'Measuring Racial Avoidance on Virtual Streets (w/ Bryce Dietrich)' - Dr Melissa Sands

Date: 26 November 2025
Time: 18:00 -19:30
Speaker:  Dr Melissa Sands
Talk Title: “Measuring Racial Avoidance on Virtual Streets (w/ Bryce Dietrich)'
Location: Ramsden room, St Catharine's College

The seminar series is supported by the Cambridge Political Economy Society and the Economics and Policy Group at the Cambridge Judge Business School.

Talk Overview:
How do pedestrians respond to the race of those around them? Building on field experiments showing that pedestrians give wider berths to Black individuals (Dietrich and Sands 2023), we extend and deepen this literature using immersive Virtual Reality (VR). First, we show that real-world pedestrian behaviours replicate in VR: on average, individuals maintain greater physical distance from Black avatars compared to white avatars. Second, we link these behavioural responses to surveys, and find no clear relationships between avoidance and pre-treatment characteristics or between "treatment" and racial attitudes. Together, this work provides insights into how nonverbal actions may carry the imprint of structural inequalities, even when such behaviours go undetected by surveys. 

Speaker Overview:
Dr Melissa Sands is Assistant Professor of Politics and Data Science at the London School of Economics and Political Sciences. She joined the Department of Government in 2021. Previously she worked at the University of California, Merced, as an Assistant Professor of Political Science. She received her PhD from the Harvard University Department of Government in 2017 and earned an MPA from the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University. She studies the consequences of context on political and civic behaviour. Her research has been published in the American Political Science Review, Nature, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, and elsewhere.