Racial biases are sadly all too prevalent in society, even as great efforts have been made to eradicate them. Even if explicit biases are reduced, the number of implicit biases still bubble under the surface. New research from the University of Barcelona explores whether immersive reality can help to reduce such biases by placing people in the body of a Black person in virtual reality.
The study suggests that the approach is no guarantee of success. For instance, if the virtual scenario is affectively negative it actually produces a rise in implicit bias. Indeed, it even reduces any “ownership” people feel of their virtual bodies. The researchers believe that their findings challenge the view that VR can act as a sort of “empathy machine”.
Virtual empathy
In virtual reality, you can change pretty much anything about the avatar you “possess”. It had been previously thought that the act of possessing the avatar gave users the illusion that the virtual body was their own, which would therefore increase empathy for the avatar.
Previous studies have shown that if a white person inhabits the body of a Black person via VR, then implicit racial biases can be reduced for as long as a week afterward. The new research suggests there are exceptions to this, however.
“In the previous studies nothing special was happening during the virtual reality exposure – it was taken as emotionally neutral or positive by participants. Here we changed adding a negative environment,” the researchers explain.
Simulating reality
A number of white female participants were positioned on a street in either a white or black body. Some of the volunteers experienced hostility from passers-by, whereas others experienced a more neutral crowd, and a third group a more positive reaction.
This, understandably, led to negative, neutral, or positive feelings in the volunteers. The results reveal that those who experienced positive or neutral reactions from passers-by had the same level of body ownership regardless of whether they were in the white or black body, while also seeing a decline in their implicit bias levels. This replicates the findings from the previous studies. When passers-by were negative, however, those in the white body had less ownership of that body.
“It is as if the person was feeling that this situation could not happen to her/him, so this can’t be her/him,” the researchers suggest.
What’s more, those with the Black body actually showed an increase in their implicit bias in these negative situations, with the researchers suggesting the negative feelings may inhibit any new learnings or associations from the experience.
Using caution
The results suggest that we should apply caution when deploying virtual reality to engender empathy, as the reduction in implicit bias observed elsewhere can certainly not be guaranteed.
“The problem is that the typical empathy machine approach is to put people in the body of a racial outgroup, and in that body subject them to various indignities, in the expectation that this might increase their empathy towards members of that group,” the researchers explain. “What we have shown is that this approach can be counter-productive. If they feel bad during the experience, then this could make things worse.”
That’s not to say that immersive virtual reality is useless in combating implicit racial bias. The findings do show that it can be effective in reducing it when the surrounding situation is either neutral or positive.
