You look down and feel something is wrong. The hands in front of you are not hands that you are not used to, and when you catch your reflection, it will be another face that meets your gaze – it is able to change the attitude of others towards you.
People look at you differently, talk to you differently, and react to the same words and gestures as strangers, as if the rules of interaction have changed without anyone explaining why.
In nothing else the environment has changed, but so has your experience. What has changed is who you are on the inside, or at least who others believe you to be.
You’re not there, but you’re wearing headphones.
In recent decades, psychologists have begun to use virtual reality (VR) to study one of the most enduring features of human life—how we relate to people from groups different from our own. From racial prejudice to political polarization, intergroup conflict shapes societies around the world. Now researchers are asking whether immersive technology can help us understand and improve these relationships.
The answer, it turns out, is complicated.
Laboratory of Social Encounters
For decades, scientists studying prejudice have relied on real-world interventions such as surveys, laboratory experiments, or intergroup communication programs. These approaches have yielded important insights but often faced practical limitations. For example, it is not easy to recreate a violent conflict between groups in a controlled setting.
In our recent critical reviewwe looked at how virtual reality is beginning to change this landscape. In VR, researchers can build detailed social worlds in which participants can meet virtual characters representing members of different groups or experience situations from someone else’s perspective. In some studies, people even live in a virtual body that represents a person belonging to another social group – what we call an outgroup avatar.
These experiences are surprisingly real. VR works by creating a strong sense of presence, a feeling of “being there” within the simulated environment. When this illusion is successful, our brains respond to the digital world in the same way as physical reality.
This realism makes VR a powerful experiential tool. Researchers can manipulate social relationships, observe behavior in real time, study how people react to complex intergroup situations, and more.
One of the coolest uses of VR is immersive to gain perspective.
In classic psychological experiments, perspective taking involves imagining what life might be like for someone else. In VR, it is imagination becomes an emotional experience.
In some experiments, participants see the world through the eyes of a person from another group, such as a victim discrimination. Others synchronize the virtual body with the participant’s movements so that the digital body begins to feel like their own.
These experiences can change the way people relate to others. Research has shown that embodying members of an outgroup or observing events from their perspective can increase empathy, reduce certain prejudices, and encourage more pro-social behavior.
However, the effects are not universal, as some interventions produce meaningful changes while others have little effect or even shock.
When virtual experiences backfire
In certain circumstances, VR interventions may produce the opposite of what the researchers intended. If the scenario feels threatening or uncomfortable, participants may psychologically withdraw from the experience. In some experiments, embodying a member of a stigmatized group actually increased bias when the situation activated negative stereotypes.
Pre-existing beliefs can also come into play: People with strong allegiances to particular political or ideological positions may interpret immersive experiences through their lens. motivated thinkingstrengthening their original relationships rather than revising them.
Even the design of the virtual world plays a role. Passive experiences, such as watching a story unfold without interacting, sometimes fail to trigger the kinds of meaningful engagement that lead to real-world attitude change.
Despite these uncertainties, research on immersive technologies and intergroup relations is expanding rapidly. The number of scientific papers on this topic has grown dramatically over the past decade, reflecting advances in technology and growing interest across disciplines. VR is now being tested in a wide range of contexts: teaching diversity, educationpolicing, health and conflict resolution.
The appeal is clear: Immersive technologies allow researchers to simulate social situations that would be impossible to recreate in real life.
A New Window on Human Relations
The dream that virtual reality could destroy prejudice overnight may have been naive, but the technology is offering something of equal value: a new way to observe mechanics. social life. Inside the headset, researchers can observe how identities change and how people react when faced with unfamiliar perspectives.
If used with care, immersive technologies may not magically turn off boundaries between “us” and “them”, but they can help us better understand these boundaries and even learn how to cross them.
