Most robots currently being sold or developed are either stylized with white material or have a metallic appearance. In this research we used the shooter bias paradigm and several questionnaires to investigate if people automatically identify robots as being racialized, such that we might say that some robots are "White" while others are "Asian", or "Black". To do so, we conducted an extended replication of the classic social psychological shooter bias paradigm using robot stimuli to explore whether effects known from humanhuman intergroup experiments would generalize to robots that were racialized as Black and White. Reaction-time based measures revealed that participants demonstrated 'shooter-bias' toward both Black people and robot racialized as Black. Participants were also willing to attribute a race to the robots depending on their racialization and demonstrated a high degree of inter-subject agreement when it came to these attributions.

Although television, computer games and the Internet play an important role in the lives of children they still also play with physical toys, such as dolls, cars and LEGO bricks. The LEGO company has become the world’s largest toy manufacturer. Our study investigates if the LEGO company’s products have become more violent over time. First, we analyzed the frequency of weapon bricks in LEGO sets. Their use has significantly increased. Second, we empirically investigated the perceived violence in the LEGO product catalogs from the years 1978–2014. Our results show that the violence of the depicted products has increased significantly over time. The LEGO Company’s products are not as innocent as they used to be.

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