Effect of Virtual Reality Perspective-Taking on Related and Unrelated Contexts

Author(s):  
Marijn Mado ◽  
Fernanda Herrera ◽  
Kristine Nowak ◽  
Jeremy Bailenson
2012 ◽  
Vol 42 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 71
Author(s):  
M. Steinisch ◽  
M.G. Tana ◽  
G. Committeri ◽  
S. Comani

2018 ◽  
Vol 13 (4) ◽  
pp. 473-491 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adam Waytz ◽  
Kurt Gray

How does online technology affect sociability? Emerging evidence—much of it inconclusive—suggests a nuanced relationship between use of online technology (the Internet, social media, and virtual reality) and sociability (emotion recognition, empathy, perspective taking, and emotional intelligence). Although online technology can facilitate purely positive behavior (e.g., charitable giving) or purely negative behavior (e.g., cyberbullying), it appears to affect sociability in three ways, depending on whether it allows a deeper understanding of people’s thoughts and feelings: (a) It benefits sociability when it complements already-deep offline engagement with others, (b) it impairs sociability when it supplants deeper offline engagement for superficial online engagement, and (c) it enhances sociability when deep offline engagement is otherwise difficult to attain. We suggest potential implications and moderators of technology’s effects on sociability and call for additional causal research.


2021 ◽  
Vol 23 (8) ◽  
pp. 2144-2166
Author(s):  
Benjamin J Li ◽  
Hye Kyung Kim

This study capitalizes on the unique capability of virtual reality (VR) to examine the efficacy of self- versus other-embodied perspective taking in promoting kidney donation in Singapore. The study used a 2 (self- vs other-embodied) × 2 (mirror vs photo presentation) between-subjects VR experiment ( N = 128), wherein participants played the role of a patient needing a kidney donation, either as themselves or as a typical organ-failure patient. Our findings showed that self-embodied perspective taking triggered self-oriented emotions (i.e. personal distress) and subsequently egoistic motivations that resulted in alternative prosocial behaviors (e.g. monetary donation, volunteering) than kidney donation. We found that embodying the other, rather than the self, had the practical benefit of inducing other-oriented emotions (i.e. empathy) and hence altruistic motivations that promoted kidney donation. This study clarified the conditions under which embodied perspective taking promoted different prosocial outcomes, and the specific mechanisms through which it achieved those outcomes.


2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (8) ◽  
pp. 42
Author(s):  
Vivian Hsueh Hua Chen ◽  
Sarah Hian May Chan ◽  
Yong Ching Tan

This study examines the effect of perspective-taking via embodiment in virtual reality (VR) in improving biases against minorities. It tests theoretical arguments about the affective and cognitive routes underlying perspective-taking and examines the moderating role of self-presence in VR through experiments. In Study 1, participants embodied an ethnic minority avatar and experienced workplace microaggression from a first-person perspective in VR. They were randomly assigned to affective (focus on emotions) vs. cognitive (focus on thoughts) perspective-taking conditions. Results showed that ingroup bias improved comparably across both conditions and that this effect was driven by more negative perceptions of the majority instead of more positive perceptions of minorities. In Study 2, participants experienced the same VR scenario from the third-person perspective. Results replicated those from Study 1 and extended them by showing that the effect of condition on ingroup bias was moderated by self-presence. At high self-presence, participants in the affective condition reported higher ingroup bias than those in the cognitive condition. The study showed that in VR, the embodiment of an ethnic minority is somewhat effective in improving perceptions towards minority groups. It is difficult to clearly distinguish between the effect of affective and cognitive routes underlying the process of perspective-taking.


2021 ◽  
pp. 174702182110248
Author(s):  
Rémi Thériault ◽  
Jay A. Olson ◽  
Sonia A. Krol ◽  
Amir Raz

Perspective-taking, whether through imagination or virtual-reality interventions, seems to improve intergroup relations; however, what intervention leads to better outcomes remains unclear. This pre-registered study collected measures of empathy and race bias from 90 participants, split into one of three perspective-taking groups: embodied perspective-taking, mental perspective-taking, and a control group. We drew on virtual-reality technology alongside a Black confederate across all conditions. Only in the first group, participants got to exchange real-time viewpoints with the confederate and literally “see through the eyes of another.” In the two other conditions, participants either imagined a day in the life of the Black confederate or in their own life, respectively. Our findings show that, compared to the control group, the embodied perspective-taking group scored higher on empathy sub-components. On the other hand, both perspective-taking interventions differentially affected neither explicit nor implicit race bias. Our study suggests that embodiment of an outgroup can enhance empathy.


2020 ◽  
Vol 20 (11) ◽  
pp. 767
Author(s):  
Morgan A. Saxon ◽  
Brandon J. Thomas ◽  
Jeanine K. Stefanucci ◽  
Sarah H. Creem-Regehr

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Xin Tong ◽  
Diane Gromala ◽  
Seyedeh Pegah Kiaei Ziabari ◽  
Christopher D Shaw

BACKGROUND Many researchers have been evaluating how digital media may impact the emotional and perspective taking aspects of empathy in both clinical and nonclinical settings. Despite the growing interest in using virtual reality (VR) and VR games to motivate empathy, few studies have focused on empathy for people who live with chronic pain. OBJECTIVE Chronic pain affects, by conservative estimates, 1 in 5 people in industrialized countries. Despite this prevalence, public awareness of chronic pain was remarkably low until the recent opioid crisis; as a result, stigma remains a problem frequently faced by people who live with this condition. To address this, the VR game <i>AS IF</i> was developed to increase nonpatients’ empathy toward the growing number of people who live with long-term chronic pain. On the basis of our prior work, we overhauled our approach, designed and built a VR prototype and evaluated it, and offered design suggestions for future research. METHODS We introduced the design features of the VR game <i>AS IF</i> and described the study we devised to evaluate its effectiveness. We adopted a mixed methods approach and compared the empathy-related outcomes in both pre- and posttesting. A total of 19 participants were recruited. RESULTS The findings of this study suggest that the VR game was effective in improving implicit and explicit empathy as well as its emotional and perspective taking aspects. More specifically, for the <i>Empathy Scale</i>, the total pretest scores (mean 47.33, SD 4.24) and posttest scores (mean 59.22, SD 4.33) did not reach statistical significance (<i>P</i>=.08). However, we did find differences in the subscales. The <i>kindness</i> subscale showed a statistically significant increase in the posttest score (mean 15.61, SD 2.85) compared with the pretest score (mean 17.06, SD 2.65;<i>P</i>=.001). For the <i>Willingness to Help Scale</i>, a significant increase was observed from a t test analysis (<i>P</i>&lt;.001) of scores before (mean 7.17, SD 2.28) and after (mean 8.33, SD 2.03) the gameplay. The effect size for this analysis was large (<i>d</i>=−1.063). CONCLUSIONS The contributions of this research are as follows: <i>AS IF</i> provides a promising approach for designing VR games to motivate people’s empathy toward patients with chronic pain, the study evaluates the potential effectiveness of such a VR approach, and the general design suggestions devised from this study could shed light on future VR game systems.


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