Virtual Embodiment and Embodied Cognition: Effect of Virtual Reality Perspective Taking Tasks on Empathy and Prejudice

Fernanda Herrera

Taking the perspective of others through the use of virtual reality (VR) technology increases empathy and reduces prejudice toward a myriad of social targets. The positive effects of VR perspective taking seem to be attributable to virtual embodiment and embodied cognition.

For most of human history, we perceived our surroundings and functioned based on what our physical bodies were able to sense and do. Later, with the establishment of written language and symbols, we were able to expand our surroundings and learn regardless of whether or not physical bodies were present (e.g., reading a book or listening to a story about a far-off place). Now, with the availability of virtual reality (VR) technology, for the first time in our history we are able to embody different kinds of bodies and explore new virtual environments with our own physical bodies. VR technology can trace its origins to the flight simulators of the 1920s and Ivan Sutherland’s head-mounted display (HMD) in the 1960s. However, only recently have technological advances made VR a commercially accessible technology. Since 2015, a plethora of new VR devices have reached the consumer market - Oculus Quest, Google Daydream, VIVE PRO, and the Lenovo Explorer to name a few. These releases increased interest in VR not only as an entertainment technology, but as an education and therapy tool that could also be used to train both emotional responses and physical behaviors.

Most of these VR systems work by replacing the perceptual input of the real world with perceptual input from the virtual environment in real time. This replacement is accomplished by: blocking out visual, auditory, and haptic feedback from the physical world; the continuous tracking of the user’s head and body movements; and the immediate rendering of a virtual body and virtual environment in response to the user’s movements and behaviors. Thus, some of the unique affordances of VR systems are their ability to immerse users in virtual environments, allow them to embody different kinds of avatars, and elicit feelings of presence (i.e., the user’s subjective feeling of being inside the virtual environment). One of the main goals of Sutherland’s first VR headset was to be able to see anything from any angle. Now, content creators are building VR experiences that allow users to virtually experience the lives of others from the first-person perspective in an effort to increase empathy and reduce prejudice.

The process of taking the perspective of others through the use of VR has been termed Virtual Reality Perspective Taking (VRPT). Traditional perspective taking tasks ask participants to imagine what it would be like to be someone else under certain circumstances and try to understand what that person is feeling. During VRPT tasks, on the other hand, participants actively experience what it is like to be somebody else in an immersive virtual environment through the use of VR technology. VR’s ability to elicit strong feelings of presence allows users to viscerally experience what it is like to be someone else and to more deeply understand perspectives other than their own. A growing area of research has leveraged VR’s affordances and demonstrated that virtually embodying different perspectives in VR can reduce prejudice and bias, increase understanding and empathy, lead to prosocial behaviors, and increase charitable donations. Furthermore, empirical evidence suggests that VRPT tasks can increase empathy for a myriad of social targets, including the elderly, people with schizophrenia, the homeless, individuals diagnosed with autism and children (see Herrera et al., 2018, for a review).

Despite growing evidence supporting the claim that VRPT tasks can increase empathy and reduce prejudice for specific social targets, a key question remains: Why is VR an effective perspectivetaking medium? Though research and debate continue, two current approaches to explaining the positive results of VRPT tasks are the virtual embodiment of the social target and embodied cognition. These two theoretical explanations of the effectiveness of VRPT tasks are synthesized below.

Virtual Embodiment

In computer-generated immersive virtual environments, users are usually represented by avatars. An avatar is a digital representation of users that are controlled in real-time. Even though the most common avatars available are human-like, users are able to embody a plethora of different virtual bodies (e.g., aliens, cows, or even pieces of coral). Because virtual environments are digitally created and programmed, when participants choose to embody a human-like avatar, they are able to embody avatars that may or may not look like them; avatars may be taller, skinnier, or have a different skin tone than the user. The type of avatar users embody can impact self-perception, attitudes, and behavior both inside and outside the virtual environment. For example, when participants embodied avatars that were taller during a negotiation task inside a virtual environment, they were less willing to accept unfair offers than their counterparts who embodied shorter avatars. Additionally, the behaviors exhibited inside the virtual environment carried over to the physical world regardless of participant’s actual height (Yee & Bailenson, 2007, cited in Seinfeld et al., 2018).

Interestingly, when users embody different types of avatars, they experience the body ownership illusion. The body ownership illusion refers to the illusory perception a person has in which they believe an artificial body or body part is their own and is the source of physical sensations. An example of this type of body ownership is the rubber hand illusion. The rubber hand illusion consists of hiding a participant’s hand and visually replacing it with a rubber hand while simultaneously stroking both the participant’s hidden hand and the rubber hand at the same time. This process has been shown to elicit a strong illusion of ownership over the rubber hand and has been found to extend to virtual bodies inside immersive virtual environments as well. More research in this area provided evidence that the body ownership illusion was not only possible for virtual body parts, but for complete virtual bodies as well.

Eliciting the body ownership illusion inside immersive virtual environments (IVE) requires several conditions. Users must wear an HMD (to block out their own physical body) and experience the virtual environment from the first-person perspective. They also must perceive their avatar’s body in some way, such as using a virtual mirror or by allowing users to look down and see their avatar’s body. Finally, the user’s avatar must exhibit visuomotor-synchrony

(i.e., as users move their physical bodies, they can see that their body controls the body of their avatar in real time). Body ownership illusions can reshape social cognition (see Herrera et al., 2018, for primary sources). They are able to mitigate stereotypes and reduce implicit racial biases when participants embody avatars that look like outgroup members. For example, in 2016 Oh and colleagues showed that negative stereotyping of the elderly was reduced by participants who embodied elderly avatars in comparison to participants who embodied a young avatar. Similarly, in 2013, Peck and colleagues found that when white participants embody dark-skinned avatars and experience the body ownership illusion, implicit racial biases are significantly reduced when compared to participants who embodied light-skinned avatars. In an extension of this work, researchers found that after embodying a dark-skinned avatar for about 12 minutes reduces implicit racial bias in comparison to participants who embodied light-skinned avatars or purple-skinned avatars.

Recently, the body ownership illusion has been found to help domestic violence offenders better recognize facial expressions in women. After embodying the body of a female victim in an IVE depicting domestic violence, offenders improved their ability to recognize fearful female faces and reduced their bias to recognize fearful faces as happy (Seinfeld et al., 2018). These results suggest that virtual embodiment can be leveraged to not only change participant’s perception, attitudes, and behavior, but that it can potentially be used as rehabilitation tool.

Embodied Cognition

Embodied cognition theory postulates that cognition is an interaction of the body and mind. In contrast to traditional cognitive theories which suggest that a person’s knowledge and representations of the world are based on amodal and abstract content, embodied cognition theory suggests that cognition is situated. In other words, cognitive activity takes place within the context of the surrounding environment. When an event occurs, the underlying sensory, somatic, and motor states are stored, and when the event is remembered, the original states are partially simulated. Thus, the interpretation and memory of a particular event is rooted in the interaction of both cognitive and bodily states. While virtual embodiment requires users to embody an avatar and experience the body ownership illusion, the embodied cognition explanation differs markedly in that it does not require users to embody any kind of avatar, but rather suggests that simply being able to move around and interact with the virtual environment in naturalistic ways allows users to better understand and empathize with perspectives other than their own.

Traditional perspective-taking tasks, although effective, rely mostly on imagination (i.e., cognitive states). In contrast, VRPT tasks allow users to viscerally experience other people’s circumstances as if they were happening to them by allowing users to physically react to the virtual experience. VRPT tasks thus activate the same sensory, somatic, and motor states that would be activated if the experience was happening to the user in real life. Compared to traditional perspective taking tasks, VRPT tasks allow for the interaction of both cognitive and whole-body states, which could lead to a more accurate interpretation of the virtual experience, and thus, a better understanding of other people’s perspectives and circumstances.

Moreover, bodily responses during interactions with novel objects have been found to influence later-reported attitudes and impressions. Physical movement can improve a participant’s performance while completing cognitive tasks, and the physical experience of a particular environment can have an effect on both perceptions and behaviors. VR allows users to move and interact with their surroundings as if they were actually there through a combination of physical body movements (e.g., walking, extending their arms to reach an object, or turning their head around to examine their surroundings) and button presses. Because of these affordances, users are able to gather spatial information about the virtual environment using the same perceptual systems they would use to gather spatial information about the real world. Thus, the user’s ability to actively engage with and move around inside an immersive virtual environment may result in improved cognition due to the additional information users are able to collect through physical movement and allow users to more effectively understand and share the feelings of those they are taking the perspective of, resulting in increased empathy and prosocial behaviors as well as reduced prejudice. These results provide evidence supporting the integration of cognitive and bodily states during perspective taking tasks and suggest that movement is an integral part of VRPT tasks’ success.

Conclusion

Overall, VRPT has been shown to consistently increase empathy, reduce prejudice, and promote prosocial behaviors toward different social targets. Across the VRPT literature, researchers suggest that virtual embodiment or embodied cognition may be the mechanisms through which VRPT increases empathy and reduces prejudice. Despite the lack of consensus on the mechanism that leads to the positive results of VRPT tasks, the explanations put forth by researchers highlight the benefits of being able to experience virtual environments with naturalistic body movements, especially in comparison to mental tasks that rely on imagination alone. Moreover, embodying virtual bodies that look different than our own can have important psychological and social effects on the way we perceive ourselves and others. However, more empirical work is needed to further understand the extent to which virtual embodiment and embodied cognition lead to the positive benefits of VRPT, and examine the interaction between them in order to be able to answer what specifically makes VR an effective perspective-taking medium.

For Sources and Further Reading

Ahn, S. J„ Bostick, J., Ogle, E„ Nowak, K. L„ McGillicuddy, K. T. & Bailenson, J. N. (2016). Experiencing nature: Embodying animals in immersive virtual environments increases inclusion of nature in self and involvement with nature. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 21(6), 399-419.

Herrera, F., Bailenson, J., Weisz, E., Ogle, E., & Zaki, J. (2018). Building long-term empathy: A large-scale comparison of traditional and virtual reality perspective-taking. PloS One, /3(10), e0204494.

Seinfeld, S., Arroyo-Palacios, J., Iruretagoyena, G., Hortensius, R., Zapata, L. E., Borland, D., ... Sanchez-Vives, M. V. (2018). Offenders become the victim in virtual reality: Impact ofchanging perspective in domestic violence. Scientific Reports, 3(1), 2692.

Won, A. S., Perone, B.. Friend, M., & Bailenson, J. N. (2016). Identifying anxiety through tracked head movements in a virtual classroom. Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking, 19(6), 380-387.