[stolio]

Do very many people do this thought experiment and say "Wow, I'd totally let the European guy keep the codes to disarm the bomb, but I'd torture the brown one."?

edit: It's a serious question. The claim is that people who support torture do so because they're "unconsciously bigoted." That seems silly so I've posed a counter question: How many people's belief in torture falls apart if they imagine the subject looking like them/sharing their religious views/etc? I don't imagine it's very many.

[yummyfajitas]

It's a good question, I have no idea why you are being downvoted.

Consider a person who's moral principles are based on empathy. Empathy is well known to be racist - we simply don't feel equally bad is a black person gets pricked with a needle than a white person. (Errors like this are why I believe empathy is a terrible basis for morality.)

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3108582/

http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal....

Now consider path dependence. If you first think about a brown person being tortured, you (statistically) are more likely to accept it - you simply feel less empathy for this person. Then when you generalize to the case of a white person, you'll similarly support torture.

Conversely, if you first think about a white person being tortured and then generalize to a black person, you'll oppose it.

So it doesn't happen that belief in torture falls apart, what happens is the example you think of to start with determines that belief.

[stolio]

I still think that's a bit simplistic and maybe politically motivated. Of course groups have different feelings towards their members and non-members.

First study: why in the world didn't they report their findings of how black people felt watching white people get hurt? That's a pretty bad bias.

Second study: are these people just fishing for proof that white people are racist?

> The less privileged the target seemed, the less participants thought s/he would experience pain. In other words, participants associated hardship with physical toughness. Importantly, target race (Black vs. White) was no longer predictive of pain ratings once we controlled for participants’ perceptions of the target’s privilege,

but they just sidestep that part for the conclusion:

> The present work demonstrates that people assume a priori that Blacks feel less pain than do Whites. This finding has important implications for understanding and reducing racial bias. It sheds new light on well-documented racial biases. Consider, for instance, the finding that White Americans condone police brutality against Black men relative to White men

How am I supposed to take these people seriously? Experiment 5 showed that blackness only correlates with a deeper, more predictive factor but they ignore that to go on a socio-political rant about the plight of black Americans. They do everything they can to fit the results into a preconceived narrative. This isn't science, it's social activism masquerading as science. 90% of their "conclusions" was about things that weren't even part of the experiment.

.

This isn't bringing us any closer to understanding how and why people are able to do awful things like commit torture, which should be the goal here. Instead we have to put that question aside and ask why such political bias isn't being called out in science.

[yummyfajitas]

For the purposes of the original question, namely how the perceived race of the victim might lead someone to support torture, these questions are moot.

However, they are useful questions more broadly. Ultimately the issue is that people motivated by empathy are going to be inconsistent and biased. While this probably won't lead them to change their opinion, the example use case they first think of may drive their original opinion.