Abstract
This study examined the use of an immersive virtual environment (IVE) in decreasing intergroup anxiety among university students. In Dinner-time360 , the students engaged in an interpersonal encounter by sharing a virtual dinner table with someone from another linguistic or cultural group. A control group watched the documentary in a traditional 2D format. The re-sults showed that the documentary reduced intergroup anxiety in both situa-tions, particularly among students with high anxiety who engaged in the IVE. For the IVE viewers, the decrease in intergroup anxiety was connected to two interpersonal elements: perceptions of the character’s immediacy and an in-creased level of homophily. These findings provide insights into the possibil-ities of IVEs in multicultural learning among university students.
Highlights
University education places great emphasis on multicultural competence, and students are encouraged to build contacts outside their home country
This study focuses on an immersive virtual environment (IVE) called Dinnertime360, in which students engage in parasocial contact by sharing a virtual dinner table with an outgroup member, that is, someone with a cultural and linguistic background other than theirs
This study examined the potential of parasocial contact in an immersive virtual environment (IVE) called Dinnertime360 for decreasing intergroup anxiety among university students and the interpersonal elements connected to any such effect
Summary
University education places great emphasis on multicultural competence, and students are encouraged to build contacts outside their home country. Within the whole data set, the relative decrease in intergroup anxiety and perceived generalized immediacy were found to be moderately positively correlated (r = .55, p < .001). A definite but small positive correlation was observed between the relative decrease in intergroup anxiety and perceived nonverbal immediacy (r = .28, p < .05). Within the IVE group, the relative decrease in intergroup anxiety correlated positively with both generalized immediacy (r = .57, p < .01) and nonverbal immediacy (r = .29, p = .078). With the latter, the correlation was not statistically significant.
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