(with Bryce Dietrich)

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.