• Happy Friday! Half the world’s population could face a global-warming-induced food crisis by 2100, according to a new study.

• And then there’s the floods…

• Need proof that evolution’s more than just a “theory”? Look no further.

• The fruit flies are back! And this time, it’s not just Palin dissing them.

• “Dear Obama: Please bring me cap and trade legislation this year.” A wish list from environmentalists.

• The U.S. isn’t the only tech sector getting slammed by the downturn.

• And now for a lesson in brutal honesty: How much does racism really bother you?

Ever since their inception and hasty popularity rise, Second Life and its virtual cohorts have been a fascinating fishbowl into human nature. With their near-limitless possibilities for meeting, dating, battling, selling to, and influencing strangers, these cyber-worlds are perfect for studying the ways we behave and interact—both the beautiful and the ugly. And there’s been plenty of the latter to go around, from rape to infidelity to theft—in other words, all the same cruelty, discourtesy, and immorality that goes on in real life, only in a smaller, more publicly track-able format.

As such, it should be no surprise that the prejudices that play out in regular society—such as, oh, say, racism—also manifest in virtual worlds. In a new paper published online in Social Influence, Northwestern University professor Wendi Gardner and grad student Paul Eastwick found that avatars with darker skin in the virtual world There.com (a close cousin to Second Life) were less likely to have a basic request granted by another avatar.

The researchers had 416 participants/avatars make 2 back-to-back requests of another avatar. The first was to teleport to 50 virtual locations and allow the requester to take a screenshot at each one (a royal pain in the cyber-rear). The second, more reasonable request was to travel to a single beach and let the asker take a screenshot.

For those requesting avatars that were white, 20 percent more people said yes to the second request. For African American-looking avatars, the increase was only 8 percent. What does this mean? As Sharon Begley of Newsweek put it:

[B]ack in the real world, decades of psychology studies have shown that whether or not someone agrees to a request under these experimental conditions—and also in real life—depends on whether they think the requester is worthy of impressing, For dark-skin avatars, apparently, the answer is, not so much.

So much for the end of racism.

The study’s data came from 943 undergraduate and graduate students, nearly all of whom had experience working for a company or corporation. They were given fictitious news reports and performance reviews from a fake company and then asked to guess the race of a set of CEOs, project leaders, and other employees described in the materials.

The participants overwhelmingly (up to 72 percent) guessed that the people in power were white, even when the students were told that the company was predominantly African American, Hispanic American, or Asian American. The same “presumption of whiteness” didn’t occur when the subjects assessed the less powerful and accomplished employees.

In experiments where the leader’s race was identified, white leaders were held to be a “better match” with “traditional leader expectations” than were minorities, even when the levels of achievement was the same for both. As a testament to the fact that subconscious bias can cross racial lines, the participants who identified themselves as racial minorities over-guessed whiteness as often as the Caucasian participants.

Prior research has showed that humans develop implicit beliefs about subjective questions like, “What should a leader look like?” and the depth and power of these beliefs in shaping our opinions can’t be overstated (”Not presidential,” anyone?). Identifying and examining these biases, and bringing them to the forefront now, may help us make choices in November that are based on logical reasoning and actual issues, as opposed to subconscious stereotypes.

Image: iStockphoto