By Emily Huegler
Modern virtual reality technology allows people to experience things as they never could in real life. Instead of simply walking past a Van Gogh painting in a museum, it’s possible to explore a 3D, life-sized version of one. There is an unexpected plus side to this experience as well — it can increase your capacity for empathy.
Virtual reality has long been credited with the ability to increase empathy, but the explanation for why this phenomenon occurs is still under examination. Dr. Baptiste Barbot, assistant professor at Pace University and adjunct professor at Yale University, published a recent study that gives a plausible explanation: it’s simply the illusion of existing and moving in someone else’s body that allows us to better understand others’ feelings and perspectives.
The experiment consisted of a five-week virtual reality program encompassing a variety of experiences, from exploring unusual environments like the Van Gogh painting to role-playing as a prince who is looking for a magical flower. The participants were given pre and post-tests to analyze their empathy levels, and various dimensions of user experience were measured to determine which were significant predictors of a change in empathy. Barbot’s findings link “illusion of virtual body ownership” and perceived agency within the VR experience to causing this change.
These illusions of embodiment and agency typically occur when one’s avatar moves in synchrony with one’s physical body. The areas of a person’s brain that normally activate when a body part is moved will also activate when the avatar’s body part is moved. In particular, empathy was shown to increase when subjects believed they were the ones in control of the virtual body’s motions. In other words, the illusion of putting yourself in someone else’s shoes and walking around in them actually does increase your ability to empathize.
It does so by broadening our imaginative abilities. Empathy is thought to consist of two parts: a cognitive aspect and an affective, or emotional aspect. The cognitive aspect is our brain’s capacity to imagine what another person is feeling and why.
“If you don’t know how to imagine someone else’s perspective, it is difficult to imagine that person’s emotional state,” Barbot explains. “If you’ve been blind all of your life, it is very difficult to imagine colors and shapes and to visualize, because you’ve never experienced the perception.” Virtual reality allows people to create a memory of being someone else, so that when they attempt to empathize later on, they can draw on the memory to imagine how another person feels.
Dr. Domna Banakou of the University of Barcelona explains that experiencing empathy through virtual reality is different from experiencing it through movies because “now it is ‘You’ who has this experience, and everything is related to the ‘Self’ which is very powerful and carries its own set of associations.”
In Barbot’s study, unique experiences like exploring a painting increased overall empathy in the same way that empathy-evoking media would. This means that using any type of perspective-taking VR experience can lessen the gap between ‘Self’ and ‘Other.’ However, Barbot warns that it’s important to understand VR as less of an “empathy machine” and more of a “perspective-taking machine.”
Still, by giving people the experience of embodiment and agency, virtual reality can be employed as a tool to help people tolerate differences, become more inclusive, and better understand their own identity. VR is already being considered for use in workplace diversity training. Banakou describes the remote nature of virtual reality as especially helpful “for those who are difficult to work with on a voluntary basis, such as violence offenders or explicit racists.”
Especially nowadays when everyone is stuck at home, being able to interact with people over VR can have many implications for how we understand and help each other. “I believe that VR will be one of the main ways of communicating in the future,” Barbot says, “so we have to anticipate that, and offer some modalities of intervention that are adapted to that.” Barbot hopes to explore virtual reality therapy as a future tool to enhance adolescent identity formation and to broaden the perspectives of those who struggle empathizing.
In a time when our country is desperately in need of more empathy, it is important that we have an understanding of how to best foster it. And when so much communication is happening over screens, it is heartening to know that technology may actually be used to help us better understand each other and create a more inclusive society.
Emily Huegler is a junior at Fordham University, double-majoring in neuroscience and journalism. She is a journalism Iintern at Happs News and a research assistant in Dr. Eduardo Gallo’s Lab of the Neural Basis of Motivated Behavior. She is a news writer for the Fordham Undergraduate Research Journal and can be reached at ehuegler@fordham.edu or linkedin.com/in/emilyhuegler/.
This story was produced as part of NASW's David Perlman Summer Mentoring Program, which was launched in 2020 by our Education Committee. Huegler was mentored by Shannon Stirone.
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