Most people associate virtual reality (VR) with videogames that offer an immersive experience. Raise a hand, and your avatar will raise its hand; turn your head, and your avatar will see a different part of the virtual room. VR, a technology that allows the user to interact physically with a computer-generated 3D environment, allows for forms of escapism that traditional videogames can’t match and builds on intimacy by making the player feel like they’re really there.

The flip side of this is that VR also allows the user to live realistic, immersive experiences from the point of view of someone else. While we can choose to steer an avatar that looks just like us, through VR we also have the chance to embody someone we would like to be, like a superhero or our favourite celebrity. But what about stepping into the shoes of someone with a completely different life experience? Someone whose point of view used to be totally out of reach, such as people with disabilities or mental disorders. Can VR make it easier for other people to understand their daily struggles?

Social psychologists have started to investigate VR as a means to better understand minorities that are usually the target of discrimination. If people could live a day in the shoes of a stigmatized individual, would they feel closer to them or wish they were even more distant?

One encouraging study from the US asked police officers to virtually live the experience of being questioned as an African American suspect. As a result, they became more inclined to help an African American unfairly targeted by the police. Another study had Singaporean participants experience working as a food vendor while wearing the shoes of an immigrant person. The experiment showed that the virtual experience was enough to decrease prejudice against immigrants. These and other studies can make us hope that virtual perspective-taking could be a powerful tool to tackle social plagues such as prejudice. But as is often the case in scientific inquiry, one must be careful when generalizing results for all contexts.

Prejudice is a complex phenomenon that manifests through negative evaluations, feelings, and behaviours towards stigmatized social groups, and attempts at reducing it sometimes backfire. It is the case of a study using VR to make people experience life from the perspective of a person with schizophrenia. The results showed that participants were less willing to interact with people with schizophrenia compared to those who did not take the VR experience by asking, for example, how would they feel having them as neighbours.

Thus, it seems like taking the perspective of a stigmatized minority through VR can both decrease or increase prejudice. What leads to one of those outcomes rather than the other? While there is no clear answer yet, some hypothesize that emotions play a key role in determining the consequences of virtual perspective-taking. For instance, people being stared at or avoided by others in VR while wearing the shoes of a black avatar showed greater prejudice after the virtual experience, while people who did not feel rejected nor avoided did not exhibit such a change. Another study simulating the perspective of a drug user showed that participants who felt emotionally close to them during a VR experience had a greater decrease in prejudice than those who did not express feeling as close. The emotions related to both of these experiments show that having positive feelings during the interaction, such as closeness, positively influences the outcomes in terms of prejudice reduction. In contrast, negative ones, such as rejection, lead to deteriorating outcomes.

There are other routes through which VR could serve prejudice reduction, such as allowing contact, as ourselves in the form of an avatar, with minority groups. According to traditional psychological theory, a member of the majority will hold less prejudice towards minorities when having the chance to spend time with their members and engage in positive activities. An obvious obstacle to this prejudice-reduction strategy is that chances of getting involved are often limited in everyday life – think, for example, of getting in touch with people with substance addictions or motor disabilities.

The strength of VR is in allowing contact in your own living room. But does it have the same effect as real-life contact? Findings are mixed. For example, a group of students was asked to meet someone with opposite political views in VR. As a result, they felt even more distant from them. Yet, a Dutch study found that facing an individual with HIV that acknowledged their condition during a work interview in VR decreased stigmatization. To draw any proper conclusions, more studies will need to be done to allow an accurate comparison between intergroup contact in real life and virtual intergroup contact.

Researchers have labelled VR “the ultimate empathy machine” thanks to its potential for enhancing empathy through perspective-taking compared to both traditional videogames and real reality. Nevertheless, this could be conditional to the virtual experiences’ features. For example, there is initial proof that when people customize their avatars to look like themselves and meet a minority member in VR, they become more prejudiced towards the encountered minority. The technology might be a great ally in reducing prejudice and discrimination towards those we don’t understand, but factors that make it different from real life need to be considered.

The examples presented in this article are just some of the 64 studies that our research group has gathered in a systematic review on the use of virtual reality in studying prejudice and its reduction. As usually occurs in research, what started as an attempt to answer a question ended up raising even more. Does the beneficial influence of a VR experience last over time? What VR-specific features boost its potential for prejudice reduction? How can we prevent VR-based interventions to backfire?

Virtual reality is still a young technology, and despite being full of potential, most of its features are yet to be discovered. Its very name points to something different from real reality, but as we have seen throughout the article, recent research seems to suggest that the boundaries between the virtual and the real are not as impermeable as one may think. Ultimately, the physical reality of a VR experience may be illusory, but the emotions and feelings we experience while on it are anything but.

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