Abstract
This study examines the effect of perspective-taking via embodiment in virtual reality (VR) in improving biases against minorities. It tests theoretical arguments about the affective and cognitive routes underlying perspective-taking and examines the moderating role of self-presence in VR through experiments. In Study 1, participants embodied an ethnic minority avatar and experienced workplace microaggression from a first-person perspective in VR. They were randomly assigned to affective (focus on emotions) vs. cognitive (focus on thoughts) perspective-taking conditions. Results showed that ingroup bias improved comparably across both conditions and that this effect was driven by more negative perceptions of the majority instead of more positive perceptions of minorities. In Study 2, participants experienced the same VR scenario from the third-person perspective. Results replicated those from Study 1 and extended them by showing that the effect of condition on ingroup bias was moderated by self-presence. At high self-presence, participants in the affective condition reported higher ingroup bias than those in the cognitive condition. The study showed that in VR, the embodiment of an ethnic minority is somewhat effective in improving perceptions towards minority groups. It is difficult to clearly distinguish between the effect of affective and cognitive routes underlying the process of perspective-taking.
Highlights
Embodiment in virtual reality (VR) has been an ongoing research field
The only exception was for situational attributions, whereby for males, it was significantly higher in the affective compared to cognitive condition; there were no differences for females
While the affective condition led to lower ingroup bias measured by self-other overlap, the moderating role of self-presence suggests that the cognitive condition led to lower ingroup bias measured by attitudes at high levels of self-presence
Summary
Embodiment in virtual reality (VR) has been an ongoing research field. The term embodiment has been applied across various multidisciplinary contexts, and its conceptualization differs largely based on the context of which embodiment is being considered. For VR embodiment has been linked to presence (the sense of being in a virtual location), in which embodiment plays a role in an individual’s self-representation [2,3,4]. The experience of individuals embodying a different identity reduces cognitive boundaries between the self and the other, effectively enabling individuals to adopt the social identity of the other [5]. Past studies have examined how VR can be used to mitigate prejudice by allowing users to embody an avatar of a different racial group. In most of these studies, was measured as implicit racial bias using the implicit association test (IAT) [6]. Hasler, Spanlang and Slater [11] found no difference in implicit prejudice change between White participants who embodied a White ingroup avatar and
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