Welcome. Welcome to our study. You have either chosen or been chosen…
I looked at the comments.
I knew it was a mistake, I did it anyways.
It sure was a mistake.
I would look at the study, while the problem is 100% real and anyone with any empathy should realize is real, to say the study supports it is a bit far fetched. Looking at the scenarios they created and the avatars, it’s all a bit uncanny valley and backrooms sort of feeling. Sort of ps2 graphics but in vr.
E: I think the conclusion puts it best, vr is a good tool for showing people what a lot of women have to deal with, and how terrible it can feel. It’s like rp for people who have trouble empathizing or don’t get why it matters.
I just had surgery and have grown a new appreciation for the fear women can feel. Im a taller dude and lifted 4-5 days a week, so im fairly bigger than other guys my size, but since my surgery im so fucking fragile and have no ability to defend myself. I live in a city and walking around at night has become a whole new experience. Before I never worried much being out alone, but now I have a constant anxiety, a fear that someone will come and overpower me. Hurt me.
I know its not entirely the same, but the fear of others in this capacity definitely makes me much more empathetic towards what I used to view as overreaction.
Ladies, I apologize.
Lady here.
You don’t have to be sorry, just stay safe and keep trying to be a good person. I wish you well on your recovery.
edit: It’s not so much about being overpowered, though that is a thing, as the mental exhaustion from having to deal with so many people who think you owe them something. The book “Verbal Judo” helped me way more than self-defense classes, I recommend it, it’s the art of de-escalation by being snarky and delightful.
Regarding fear, our results show that this emotion is higher in the catcalling situation, however, there is no significant difference with the control condition. This suggests that experiencing an urban underground environment at night from a woman’s perspective is inherently fear-inducing, independent of explicit harassment.
Does it, though? It would be better if they had a control group where participants used a male avatar. My understanding is that both groups used female avatars:
In the experimental condition, the avatars used typical Italian catcalling expressions (documented in newspaper articles and sociological research on the topic of verbal street harassment), while in the control group (condition), the avatars posed general questions to the participants.
I have no doubt that it can be scary for a woman to be in this setting in real life. However, I’d like to see scientific proof that this feeling can be specifically induced in men who are controlling female characters in VR. Right now, it’s more of an assumption, isn’t it? As a gamer, I know that the location itself can be scary, that sound design (music, ambient sounds, voice acting) can be frightening, and that trying VR for the first time can also be uncomfortable.
Why would it be assumption? Then it wouldn’t be a study? They tested for something and got predictable results. Assumption is when you don’t do that.
I’d also be worried about the reaction being tainted by the target not being your desire. Like, I’d imagine a straight dude will be more uncomfortable being catcalled by a dude than a lady (regardless of whether their avatar is a woman or not). Obviously the study is a bit more robust than that, but it’s still an inherent issue hard to circumvent just with VR.
What does that have to do with anything? The only reason I’d be more comfortable with a woman cat-calling me is because I’m significantly bigger than most women and my position in society lends me a lot more power and confidence. Even if a dude did it I’d be way better off than if I were a woman so I can brush it off more easily. I’m also not attracted to every woman I see so what does it matter?
Besides, turn that around and ask yourself if you really think that a straight woman being cat-called by a man makes them feel any better. In fact, maybe the inherent lack of attraction found between a male participant and a male cat-caller actually makes the point that much stronger. “I’m not attracted to this person and yet they continue to pressure me and that makes me feel all the more unsafe”.
Any normal person can experience some level of fear in this situation, not just women. I would also experience some level of anxiety even with a fully loaded handgun in pocket.
Catcalling is uncomfortable in many situations, so these are not exactly connected between each other except for both being some negative experience in most of cases.
Right, but as a 6’-5” dude I feel a lot less anxiety. When I feel any anxiety I can ignore it and remind myself that the shit I’m conjuring up just doesn’t actually happen here. Meanwhile, my friend has been followed home multiple times and all she did was be vaguely kind to a man. One time she didn’t even ever talk to the dude, he just saw her at the bar and decided that was his night to be a gargantuan piece of filth!
No one is actually going to mug me here but I know many people who constantly need to be on edge around men, even people who are supposed to be their friends. It’s not about feeling anxious, it’s about understanding that women experience all the same anxieties and also have to deal with a bunch of other, far more real, threats all the while being often physically smaller/weaker.
You’re not wrong that both genders experience anxiety but you have just entirely missed the point. When the women in your life deal with this shit I hope you approach the situation with more compassion than whatever drove you to writing that stupid comment.
—
On another note, carrying a weapon actually makes you more anxious. You’d think it would give a feeling of safety but it really doesn’t, so you best be damn sure you have a real good reason to be packing heat.
Your point?
You don’t need a study with crossdressing to understand these 2 facts. It is nice that they have done it but it was not necessary.
Yes it is.
I wish they had tested all 8 scenarios: Male/female participant, male/female body, catcalled/not catcalled.
Because even as a man I don’t feel comfortable being alone at a subway station at night. Nor can I imagine would I then enjoy being catcalled.
I wonder how much your VR body seen in a mirror affects this. My gut says not a lot but more data would’ve been great.
Now, if your own VR body does affect your reaction there must be bodies which maximize/minimize reactions. That’d be fun to test. You don’t even have to limit yourself to human bodies, what if you’re, say, a dinosaur (with body height still being the same)?
While my first reaction was the same - “how would they react in male avatars?”, that doesn’t seem to be the point at all of this study but rather the potential of VR to change the subjects behaviour in real life by helping empathy along.
Introduction
[…]
Peck et al.13 found that White participants, after embodying a Black avatar, showed a reduction in implicit racial bias.
This principle has been extended to the context of gender-based violence.
Seinfeld et al.14 had male offenders embody a female victim of domestic violence, finding that the VR experience significantly improved their ability to recognize fear in female facial expressions—a deficit common in violent offenders15.
Similarly, other studies using 360° videos and immersive scenarios of sexual harassment have reported marked increases in empathy and changes in violent attitudes among participants16.
[…]
These findings collectively affirm the potential of VR as a rehabilitative tool for enhancing emotional understanding and mitigating harmful behaviors.Building on this foundation, the present study utilizes immersive VR to provide male participants with a firsthand experience of catcalling.
While previous research has often focused on overt violence, our goal is to investigate the affective response to a more commonplace form of street harassment. We hypothesize that this embodied experience will elicit morally salient emotions like disgust and anger19,20,21.
By inducing this moral discomfort, the intervention aims to foster self-awareness and encourage a reconsideration of the behavior’s impact22, serving as a potential strategy to promote behavioral change.That’s fair, I only really glossed over the study.
But still, have they actually collected data to support illiciting these emotions works as a “potential strategy to promote behavioral change”? In the study, I haven’t found anything like a pre and post experiment survey showing a different attitude towards catcalling. In my mind that’s required to demonstrate the VR experiment is such a strategy.
And catcalled by M & F I guess?
But that would be actual science and not whatever the slop study in the article is.
I feel like if you’re going to slag off the study as “slop” you should at least follow the links to the study itself where you can see that they did in fact have a control group who were posed general questions instead of catcalling. They didn’t switch genders because that wasn’t the purpose of the study.
Thats a slop study through and through
They didn’t switch genders because that wasn’t the purpose of the study.
The purpose of the study being to get the results they wanted to get. That’s not science.
It’s basically a study of “do people like being assaulted”. No one does regardless of gender, but they took that as women don’t like being assaulted and men pretending to be women don’t like being assaulted. Therefore men pretending to be women in VR don’t like to be assaulted.
What sort of conclusion is that.
It would help to read the study so you don’t have to be wrong about things.
I did read it. It’s very very long though have you read all of it, I started to get bored when they started showing really complicated diagrams with no real explanation as to how they came to those conclusions.
Social studies is like that, it’s very much couched in the sort of science that you would normally expect of physics or engineering but all it’s conclusions are fuzzy but they come out with these concrete graphs to explain very personal responses. I find it to be intellectually dishonest to suggest that you can represent the world like that
“I don’t understand it so it’s wrong,” isn’t a great way to prove a point.
Social studies? Do you mean the neurology? Or the psychology? You know “fuzzy logic” is a form of math, right?
Maybe you got bored when they explained what metrics they used and how they applied them.
I can where to say this. This is anything but science. Entertainment at best.
Similar social experiments include the same fear from being on the receiving end of society when people in real life dressed as Muslims, Jews, homeless people, even as black people (much harder to do). There is such trusism as walking in the shoes of another person. Living as them for a week would be most interesting.
Black Like Me was eye opening for a lot of people. Even John Howard Griffin, who did blackface to understand the black southern experience, and already fought for civil rights, was surprised by how he was treated.
If I remember it right, at the beginning of his journey he had to beg and find help because he was refused service when trying to cash his travellers checks.
Here’s the link to the actual article.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-025-19418-4.pdf
Paper itself above. Need a deeper reading with my notes but on the surface the stats are so-so. They check normality, but don’t confirm linearity (use of pmcc will not be valid without - there are also a few other conditions to check for hypothesis testing with PMCC if memory serves), use of a continuous test (PMCC, ANOVA, unpaired t’s) for discrete (likert) data is also little controversial, but generally condoned.
As for the conclusion, not a psych phd so I’ll assume they know their stuff!
my personal rule of thumb is that if it’s published in Nature, Cell, or another well-regarded journal, the statistical and experimental methodologies are almost certainly solid. Do you think I should adjust that rule going forward?
Honestly, I always poke the stats no matter how good the journal. The best way to read any article is as a skeptic (the onus is on the writer to prove their point), and any small irregularity is something to be queried.
No matter how good the journal, it’s only as good as the reviewers, and reviewers are humans too. Odds are a paper in nature is all above board, but I’m somewhat of a pedant when it comes to checking test conditions.
i do that to, i also try to find most recent research, anything older than 5+years is suspect, because they always come with revised papers in newer studies/research eventually.
In some fields (e.g. mathematics) old papers hold up well. However, in fields like psychology where the landscape shifts a lot that’s probably a good shout!
sometimes, but they have retracted quite a few papers based on misleading papers, or even AI rgenerated. also because it can mislead readers into thinking “oh this is the sole cause and effect” but not potential alternative scenarios.
Thank you!
Turns out walking through a sketchy area and being harassed are scary no matter what genitalia you have.
Yeah, but the point here is that they were posing as women with female looking avatars. One guy even says that he would have reacted differently if it was male:
Another participant reported that he would have reacted differently had he been in the role of a man, but since he was embodying a female character, he chose instead to walk away.
Oh this is such nonsense.
They basically decided “what if we tested a scenario that has been happening in ChatVR for about 10 years.”
When I play a shooting game in VR I don’t think I’m going to die, I do not experience fear. Any claims along those lines are at best overstated and at worst straight up lies.
Also what’s this research supposed to prove anyway?
to fight an anecdote with an anecdote - when i play games sure i don’t experience the fear of death, but i do experience compassion towards what i’m fully aware is a bunch of pixels & lines of code presented to me as a character in a video game. and i experience the thrill of discovery or a tough fight with a boss. the more i’m immersed in a game the deeper emotions i feel.
and VR in particular is much more immersive. even in a game like Beatsaber, which doesn’t aim at realism, your brain interprets the boxes coming at you as actual objects about to slam into your face. you intuitively attempt to dodge them, especially when you’re in the flow state of playing.
games can elicit emotions, and VR games can do it in an even stronger way. from my perspective, there is no reason to doubt the results of this study, especially if the fear response wasn’t measured through a subjective report of emotions, but through observing the physiological effects fear has on the body.
the research is supposed to highlight - not prove, there is nothing to prove, it’s a fact - how much fear women and girls go through in their daily lives, that men or boys don’t have to worry about
Ah yes, the ever popular “I’ve never experienced it, so it doesn’t exist” argument.
Where did I make that arguement.
VR is not the real world. It’s not the holiday so you can’t turn off safety protocols to simulate real world threats.
When I play a shooting game in VR I don’t think I’m going to die, I do not experience fear. Any claims along those lines are at best overstated and at worst straight up lies.
Did you forget to read your own comment? Because this is you saying that the study is wrong because of your limited personal experience, which no one cares about.
Your anecdote does not invalidate data
When I play a shooting game in VR I don’t think I’m going to die, I do not experience fear. Any claims along those lines are at best overstated and at worst straight up lies.
Who cares what you experience in the context of this study? Why is your input here useful in the context of the discussion? What does this statement add? Why did you say this? Why would anyone here want to know this?
He assumes that the feelings were not real because he doesn’t have feelings in VR. If true for everybody that would invalidate the results.
Too many layers of ego death for him to answer that (it’s obviously a dude with that level of self-centered ignorance).
Turn your logic around. If men feel the fear when it is just a simulation then real life for women is much worse.
Perhaps you are a sociopath?
You need to learn what sociopath means.
This is a dumb test. How people react in VR is not relevant to the real world.
So dumb. They stupidly cited studies about how the same therapy has applied to the real world, and other possible applications. They even had a section about testing embodiment in their VR scenario, talked about neurology, and used multiple metrics to compare the before and after for both groups.
I guess anything can be dumb if you don’t read it.
Talking about neurology doesn’t automatically validate their method though. I’m not an expert in this field but my impression is that the researchers make a lot of assumptions that I’d describe as shortcuts; gloss over the differences that they found between the experimental and control groups; and then reach a lot with their conclusion.
One thing that stands out to me is the identification of feelings of disgust and anger to support that the VR setting can be used to elicit social change. This implies that the participants would not have felt disgust or anger had their avatar been male; or if it was a normal videogame; or if this wasn’t a game at all but a film instead; or if this wasn’t audiovisual but a book instead…
I don’t think they did anything to substantiate that line of thinking, and I’m not convinced by the various psychological scales that they used to support the connection they made. As far as I’m concerned these same men could have responded with disgust just by hearing a retelling of a similar event by a random stranger. The study at least does nothing to lead me to assume otherwise.
The disgust, fear and anger responses are at the core of the argument to support their central thesis that “first-person virtual embodiment of a female target of catcalling is a useful method for eliciting morally salient negative emotions in male participants”. But my understanding of their methodology leaves me unimpressed and unconvinced.
Why don’t you trust their metrics? If you don’t think the tests were accurate measurements, what would work better?
They used neurolinguistics and neural pathway mapping, there’s a whole section on it.
Testing one thing by no means implies any other method wouldn’t have proven the same thing. That’s… that’s not how studies work. They’re testing the efficacy of their methods.
That’s the hypothesis, not a thesis.
I think that if you say
In clinical settings, it may serve as an intervention to increase emotional awareness and empathy among individuals who have engaged in harassment, with the aim of modifying their behavior.
then you need your metrics to control for, among other things, “individuals who have engaged in harassment”
But they’re not just testing efficacy either. They’re making a qualitative statement that VR has certain special characteristics when it comes to aiding empathy. That’s a claim that absolutely need to be contrasted against other media, and it’s absolutely “how studies work”.
One thing that stands out to me is the identification of feelings of disgust and anger to support that the VR setting can be used to elicit social change. This implies that the participants would not have felt disgust or anger had their avatar been male; or if it was a normal videogame; or if this wasn’t a game at all but a film instead; or if this wasn’t audiovisual but a book instead…
Genuinely, I’m not sure how you come to that conclusion from reading the paper, it’s very much not what the authors say. It never makes the claim that they wouldn’t have also felt that disgust and anger in an altered situation (male avatar etc.), only that there was a difference between the control group and the catcalled group, and that the difference was observable using their novel (and really cool) VR+AI methodology. That’s quite explicitly their entire thesis. They don’t investigate other scenarios, presumably because it was outside the scope of the research.
The conclusion from the paper:
Our study demonstrates that first-person virtual embodiment of a female target of catcalling is a useful method for eliciting morally salient negative emotions in male participants. Our findings indicate that this simulated experience goes beyond mere observation, inducing significant increases in disgust and anger – emotions intrinsically linked to moral evaluation and behavioral change. The study not only validates virtual reality as a tool for perspective-taking, but also introduces a novel computational approach to quantify the nuanced, implicit dimensions of this experience.
Our findings contribute to cognitive and methodological advancements as much as for promoting social safety. Employing virtual embodiment to enhance emotional sensitivity in men holds promise for both clinical and educational applications. In clinical settings, it may serve as an intervention to increase emotional awareness and empathy among individuals who have engaged in harassment, with the aim of modifying their behavior. In educational contexts, VR can be employed to simulate ecological environments that vividly illustrate the negative impact of street harassment, such as catcalling, by enabling participants to directly experience the emotional distress caused by such situations. Unlike real-world harassment, Virtual Reality simulation can be immediately terminated if distress becomes excessive, and it is able to offer embodiment experiences impossible through traditional methods.
They don’t say this can be used to fix catcalling or improve society on it’s own, just that the results seem to indicate there is a basis to believe that VR can elicit varying emotional responses between different scenarios and that we can measure the differences in reaction.
Here’s how I came to that conclusion.
We hypothesize that this embodied experience will elicit morally salient emotions like disgust and anger. By inducing this moral discomfort, the intervention aims to foster self-awareness and encourage a reconsideration of the behavior’s impact, serving as a potential strategy to promote behavioral change.
That’s… the hypothesis.
Irrelevant is too strong a word given the opportunities in VR for training or even therapy… but you have a point.
Training and therapy absolutely. But this is about empathy, they are claiming the people are more empathetic when they experience a situation in VR than if they haven’t experienced that situation ever in any medium.
I don’t believe they’ve demonstrated that.
At best they’ve demonstrated the people are empathetic but they might be anyway. They definitely haven’t demonstrated that that’s a result of the VR experience. To do that they would have had to have taken some sort of test both before and after the VR experience to see if their attitudes have changed.
Training and therapy are appropriate uses for VR because they don’t need to demonstrate that they are better than real world alternatives, because the benefit they have is cost. They are cheaper in VR than they are in the real world, that’s the only metric they need to pass.
Did anyone study the opposite? I remember reading about a woman that pretended to be a man for a few weeks to write a book about it, and she described it as something like “soul crushingly lonely”.
Norah Vincent. She was particularly beloved by the manosphere because her experience pretending to be a man for 18 months (not just a few weeks) lead to her “conversion” from a feminist to realising that men too have their own problems.
Thought, she personally was already libertarian, and highly critical of trans people, so she reads more like a TERF imo.
Sadly passed away via assisted suicide a few years ago.
Norah Vincent - Wikipedia - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norah_Vincent
Which is super ironic, as feminism acknowledges mens issues.
I don’t know of any studies, but I have heard anecdotes from trans men that say the same thing.
I once read a very well put together comment by a trans man on the subject of their experience with this before and after transitioning, and basically, because men are never supposed to show emotion, their relationships lack a level of emotional intimacy at a fundamental level. They said that their relationships with other men felt hollow and largely superficial.
It’s also why men seemingly mistake friendship from women as flirting so frequently - because women can have a true emotional connection in their friendships with other women, but men can only get that same level of connection in romantic relationships or life or death scenarios such as war. Women also often treat men more coldly than they do other women as a result of this to avoid being mistaken for flirting with every man that they talk to (or because they view men as dangerous).
Kind of unfortunate, that even here on lemmy most comments immediately flip to “but as a man I also feel scared”. True, but it’s not what this study is about. Maybe in 2026 we can try to just read something like this and take it as a prompt that, maybe, some things are not about us. Maybe we should do something about catcalling. We can talk about violence against men and loneliness at a different occasion.
Living in Japan, the country famous for being completely safe for everyone, this gap recently became clearer to me. As it turns out, when people talk about safety in Japan, they primarily mean that you won’t be beaten up and nobody steals your wallet. But there are so many weird creeps around here. I’m really quite happy I don’t live here as a woman.
My SO praises Sweden so much, nobody catcalls and people only bother you because you don’t have your bicycle helmet and that (only) annoys all genders.
The language of the post says something that cannot be (meaningfully) derived without a control group of people that didn’t experience a counterpoint: “… the situation of being a young woman alone at night in a subway station being enough to generate the sense of fear.”
As I understand it, everyone in the study experienced all of that in combination, so any subset of those things may have been enough to generate a sense of fear: being alone, being at night, being a young woman, or being on a subway station.
The common objection I see is that everyone feels fear alone on a subway station at night, so the statement is misleading. That matches my personal experience, so I also see that statement as misleading, regardless of any work done by the study.
Interesting experiment.
Some very condensed info:
Women disproportionately experience gender based violence and aggression in the wild. Researchers wanted to see if the experience of men being harassed and catcalled in a woman’s avatar could promote empathy and understanding. This experiment on 36 male students (average age of 23) was based on other studies that found similar results, including a study on male offenders of gender based violence — to test if first-person VR experiences as women could increase pro-social behaviors.
The students had “no prior experience” with interpersonal aggression or catcalling as victims or perpetrators, measured on a scale with a maximum threshold.
The scene began in a bedroom, where participants were able to move and see themselves as their avatar in a mirror.
In a control group, the participants were asked innocuous questions instead of being catcalled.
Edit: For anyone asking: Why didn’t they study why men don’t feel safe? You can look up and post those studies. Nothing is stopping you. This is about the prosocial effects of this VR scenario. Need more support? [email protected] and [email protected] are two great communities to discuss men’s issues.
Half Life 2 graphics for maximum immersion
“You. Pick up that can.”
bends over
“Nice!”
*blushes*
Welcome to city 17
I mean… I’d feel disgust, anger and fear.
My guess is that the men who don’t think they’d be bothered by cat-calling are imagining a scenario where there are lots of other people around and the risk of being physically attacked is very low. (Something like the stereotypical image of construction workers whistling at a woman walking by them on a busy sidewalk.) Being on a nearly-empty subway platform with the only other guy nearby accosting you is a genuinely risky situation even without pretending that you’re a woman.
One time I was walking on the sidewalk when a car with several young women drove by and one of them leaned out the window and yelled something at me. I didn’t hear what she said but I like to think that it was positive and it made my day, but the caveat is that I did not feel like I was in any physical danger at all from them.
You said it. I compared notes, once, with my partner at the time, who occasionally dressed a bit flamboyant. Being shouted at made him feel annoyed and sad, which sucks, but he thought that put him on the same level as me.
The difference was he could recall each time he was catcalled, and was surprised to hear it happened just about daily to me. Even more surprised to hear that sometimes when I didn’t respond, guys have followed me and kept shouting. Sometimes in groups. Extremely surprised to hear that on a few occasions I’ve actually had to run from these groups.
Catcalling is easy to ignore, but considering I literally had to run from strangers, I still slide my keys between my knuckles and get ready to sprint whenever I hear it.
Here’s the video of the study: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ztqLcoaDlHc
