An Embodied Perspective as a Victim of Sexual Harassment in Virtual Reality Reduces Action Conformity in a Later Milgram Obedience Scenario

Solène Neyret,Mel Slater,Ramon Oliva,Alejandro Beacco,Xavi Navarro,Jose Valenzuela,Itxaso Barberia,Pierre Bourdin

doi:10.1038/s41598-020-62932-w

Solène Neyret, Mel Slater + Show 6 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-020-62932-w

Copy DOI

Abstract

Group pressure can often result in people carrying out harmful actions towards others that they would not normally carry out by themselves. However, few studies have manipulated factors that might overcome this. Here male participants (n = 60) were in a virtual reality (VR) scenario of sexual harassment (SH) of a lone woman by a group of males in a bar. Participants were either only embodied as one of the males (Group, n = 20), or also as the woman (Woman, n = 20). A control group (n = 20) only experienced the empty bar, not the SH. One week later they were the Teacher in a VR version of Milgram’s Obedience experiment where they were encouraged to give shocks to a female Learner by a group of 3 virtual males. Those who had been in the Woman condition gave about half the number of shocks of those in the Group condition, with the controls between these two. We explain the results through embodiment promoting identification with the woman or the group, and delegitimization of the group for those in the Woman condition. The experiment raised important ethical issues, showing that a VR study with positive ethical intentions can sometimes produce unexpected and non-beneficent results.

Highlights

Www.nature.com/scientificreports concluded that the likelihood of obedience was positively correlated with the directiveness of the experimenter, and negatively related with several factors: the pressure of a peer group to disobey, the distance between the Teacher and Learner and how direct their interactions were, the distance between the Teacher and Experimenter, the intimacy between Teacher and Learner, and the illegitimacy and inconsistency of the experimenter
In its simplest form our question was how their action conformity in the Obedience scenario would be modulated if one week earlier they had been in the embodied perspective of a woman on the receiving end of verbal sexual harassment by the same group of virtual men acting as experimenters
The distribution of the number of shocks administered best follows a mixture of two Weibull distributions, which in itself gives some information about the mechanism involved in withdrawal from the experiment

Summary

Introduction

Www.nature.com/scientificreports concluded that the likelihood of obedience was positively correlated with the directiveness of the experimenter, and negatively related with several factors: the pressure of a peer group to disobey, the distance between the Teacher and Learner and how direct their interactions were, the distance between the Teacher and Experimenter, the intimacy between Teacher and Learner, and the illegitimacy and inconsistency of the experimenter. The focus, was on giving men the experience of being in the situation of a woman being harassed, and we used the Milgram paradigm as an objective measure of whether that intervention had any influence on their subsequent aggressive behaviour. Another way to put this is that the purpose was to see whether embodiment as the woman would break the in-group solidarity with the virtual males, that is, the ‘followership’ of those male experimenters. Virtual body ownership can result in changes in attitudes and behaviours of the experiencer, with respect to age[16,17,18], race[19,20,21], pain sensitivity[22,23], motor behaviour[24], and cognitive task performance[25]

Methods

Results

Conclusion