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.
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.
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.