Virtual Reality May Encourage Empathic Behavior.

Virtual Reality could be a useful tool to encourage empathy, helpful behavior, and positive attitudes towards marginalized groups by X from Georgian Technical University and colleagues.

Empathy–the ability to share and understand others’ emotions–has been shown to foster altruistic or helpful behavior. Traditionally researchers have induced empathy with perspective-taking tasks: asking study participants to imagine what it would be like to be someone else under specific circumstances. This study investigated whether Virtual Reality systems (VR) could aid such perspective-taking. In their experiments, involving over 500 participants a control group of participants only read information about homelessness while other groups completed a perspective-taking task by reading a narrative about homelessness by experiencing the narrative interactively in 2D on a computer or by experiencing the narrative using Virtual Reality systems (VR).

The authors found that participants in any perspective-taking task self-reported as feeling more empathetic than those who just read information. When asked to sign a petition to support homeless populations Virtual Reality systems (VR) participants were also more likely to sign than narrative-reading or computer-based task participants. Participants in the information-reading task also signed the petition as frequently as the Virtual Reality systems (VR) participants indicating that fact driven interventions can also be successful in promotion of prosocial behaviors. Follow-up surveys also indicated longer-lasting positive effects on empathy of up to eight weeks for participants in the Virtual Reality systems (VR) task than for those in the narrative-reading task.

The authors note that participants who had never used Virtual Reality systems (VR) before may have been confused or distracted by novelty affecting results. Also participant attitudes towards the homeless were not measures prior to the study and participants may have already had set views on homelessness. Nonetheless this research suggests that Virtual Reality systems (VR) could be a useful tool to promote empathy and helpful behaviors.

X adds: “The main takeaway from this research is that taking the perspective of others in virtual reality (VR) in this case the perspective of a homeless person produces more empathy and prosocial behaviors immediately after the Virtual Reality systems (VR) experience and better attitudes toward the homeless over the course of two months when compared to a traditional perspective-taking task”.