Last year, a study from Stanford University explored how virtual reality affected our ability to empathize with other people. The research suggested that when people were exposed to scenarios such as losing their jobs or homes via virtual reality, their compassion towards people who had actually lost them increased.
VR headsets are on the rise, but to date they have mostly been used in a gaming context. Advocates believe they can significantly boost our empathy levels by placing us in the shoes of others in a realistic manner. The authors wanted to put this claim to the test.
They conducted a couple of month-long studies with several hundred participants with a wide demographic spread. Some of the participants were shown a seven-minute VR experience, called Becoming Homeless, in which a narrator guides viewers through a number of interactive scenarios that would unfold should they ever lose their jobs.
Other participants were then shown content via other media, including written text and a two-dimensional scenario presented via a computer. The data suggests that those exposed to the VR scenario were more empathetic than those exposed to other forms of media.
“Taking the perspective of others in VR produces more empathy and prosocial behaviors in people immediately after going through the experience and over time in comparison to just imagining what it would be like to be in someone else’s shoes,” the researchers say. “And that is an exciting finding.”
Lasting effect
What’s perhaps most interesting is not only that participants were more likely to show empathy after going through the VR experience, but that these feelings persisted for a prolonged period of time.
“What’s special about this research is that it gives us longitudinal evidence that VR changes attitudes and behaviors of people in a positive way,” the researchers say.
The researchers plan to explore what it is about virtual reality that helps us to develop empathy for others, and whether certain scenarios work better than others. For the time being however, they believe their work adds to the debate, and even in their own small way have changed how people behave, with many of the participants contacting the researchers to say how the experiment has shifted their mindset, and helped them become more involved in their community.
Boosting empathy
The finding has been echoed in a second study, conducted by researchers at University College London, which highlighted how virtual reality can be useful in better understanding someone’s point of view.
The study found that VR was especially useful in scenarios in which empathy did not come easily or naturally. A VR experience can provide the kind of multi-sensory feedback that can help to coax the brain into thinking the virtual body on the screen is its own. This then results in the brain responding to virtual events as it they were unfolding in the real world.
The findings emerged after participants were scanned using functional magnetic resonance imaging to explore what their brains were doing as they underwent virtual reality simulations involving a man abusing a women, with the footage shot from the perspective of the woman.
Before watching the footage, each volunteer went through various virtual reality scenarios as a women, or as a bystander watching a woman. The results reveal that those who had undergone this first-person embodiment were able to identify the woman’s body as their own, with brain activity to match. They also showed brain activity synonymous with threat perception whenever the man got close.
The studies highlight how effective virtual reality could be in enhancing the degree of empathy we’re able to show and feel to others.
