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Body swapping with a Black person boosts empathy: Using virtual reality to embody another.

ABSTRACT: Perspective-taking, whether through imagination or virtual-reality interventions, seems to improve intergroup relations; however, which intervention leads to better outcomes remains unclear. This preregistered 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 with the control group, the embodied perspective-taking group scored higher on empathy sub-components. On the contrary, both perspective-taking interventions differentially affected neither explicit nor implicit race bias. Our study suggests that embodiment of an outgroup can enhance empathy.

SUBMITTER: Theriault R

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8532211 | biostudies-literature | 2021 Dec

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Body swapping with a Black person boosts empathy: Using virtual reality to embody another.

Thériault Rémi R Olson Jay A JA Krol Sonia A SA Raz Amir A

Quarterly journal of experimental psychology (2006) 20210630 12

Perspective-taking, whether through imagination or virtual-reality interventions, seems to improve intergroup relations; however, which intervention leads to better outcomes remains unclear. This preregistered 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. ...[more]

PMID: 34049469

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Project description:BackgroundAltering the normal association between touch and its visual correlate can result in the illusory perception of a fake limb as part of our own body. Thus, when touch is seen to be applied to a rubber hand while felt synchronously on the corresponding hidden real hand, an illusion of ownership of the rubber hand usually occurs. The illusion has also been demonstrated using visuomotor correlation between the movements of the hidden real hand and the seen fake hand. This type of paradigm has been used with respect to the whole body generating out-of-the-body and body substitution illusions. However, such studies have only ever manipulated a single factor and although they used a form of virtual reality have not exploited the power of immersive virtual reality (IVR) to produce radical transformations in body ownership.Principal findingsHere we show that a first person perspective of a life-sized virtual human female body that appears to substitute the male subjects' own bodies was sufficient to generate a body transfer illusion. This was demonstrated subjectively by questionnaire and physiologically through heart-rate deceleration in response to a threat to the virtual body. This finding is in contrast to earlier experimental studies that assume visuotactile synchrony to be the critical contributory factor in ownership illusions. Our finding was possible because IVR allowed us to use a novel experimental design for this type of problem with three independent binary factors: (i) perspective position (first or third), (ii) synchronous or asynchronous mirror reflections and (iii) synchrony or asynchrony between felt and seen touch.ConclusionsThe results support the notion that bottom-up perceptual mechanisms can temporarily override top down knowledge resulting in a radical illusion of transfer of body ownership. The research also illustrates immersive virtual reality as a powerful tool in the study of body representation and experience, since it supports experimental manipulations that would otherwise be infeasible, with the technology being mature enough to represent human bodies and their motion.

Dataset Information

Body swapping with a Black person boosts empathy: Using virtual reality to embody another.

Publications

Body swapping with a Black person boosts empathy: Using virtual reality to embody another.

Similar Datasets

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