You look down and something feels wrong. The hands that are in front of you are not the ones you are used to and when you catch your reflection, it is another face that meets your gaze – it is able to change the attitude of others towards you.
People look at you differently, talk to you differently, and react to the same words and gestures in ways that feel unfamiliar, as if the rules of communication have changed without explaining why.
Something else environment has changed, but your experience of it. What has changed is who you are on the inside, or at least what others believe you to be.
Except you’re not there, but you’re wearing headphones.
Over the past few decades, psychologists have begun using virtual reality (VR) to investigate one of the most enduring features of human life: how we relate to people who belong to groups other than our own. From racial prejudice to political polarization, intergroup tensions shape societies around the world. Researchers are now asking whether immersive technology can help us understand and improve these relationships.
The answer, it turns out, is complicated.
Social Encounters Lab
For decades, scholars studying prejudice have relied on surveys, laboratory experiments, or real-world interventions such as intergroup contact programs. These approaches have provided important insights, but have often faced practical limitations. For example, it is not easy to recreate a violent encounter between groups under controlled conditions.
In our latest critical reviewwe examined how virtual reality is changing this landscape. In VR, researchers can create detailed social worlds where participants can meet virtual characters representing members of different groups or experience a situation from someone else’s perspective. In some studies, people even live in a virtual body that represents a person who belongs to a different social group – what we call out-group embodiment.
These experiences feel surprisingly real. VR works by creating a strong sense of presence, the feeling of “being there” in a simulated environment. When this illusion succeeds, our brains respond to the digital world in almost the same way as physical reality.
This realism makes VR a powerful experiential tool. Researchers can manipulate social interactions, observe behavior in real time, understand how people react to complex intergroup situations, and more.
One of the most amazing uses of VR is immersive perspective.
In classic psychological experiments, perspective-taking involves imagining how life feels for someone else. In VR that is imagination becomes an emotional experience.
In some experiments, participants see the world through the eyes of someone from another group, such as a victim discrimination. Others go further, synchronizing the virtual body with the participant’s movements so that the digital body feels like its own.
These experiences can change how people feel about others. Studies have shown that impersonating an out-group member or observing events from their perspective can increase empathy, reduce certain biases, and encourage more pro-social behavior.
However, the effects are not universal, as some interventions produce significant changes, while others show little effect or even an unexpected response.
When virtual experiences are reversed
Under certain conditions, VR interventions may produce the opposite of what researchers intended. If the scenario feels threatening or uncomfortable, participants may psychologically withdraw from the experience. In some experiments, impersonating a stigmatized group member actually increased bias when the situation activated negative stereotypes.
Pre-existing beliefs can also come into play: People who are strongly committed to particular political or ideological positions may view inclusive experiences through the lens of valid argumentstrengthening their initial relationships rather than revising them.
Even the design of the virtual world plays a role. Passive experiences, such as watching a story without interaction, sometimes fail to produce the kinds of meaningful engagement that lead to real-world attitude change.
Despite these uncertainties, research on inclusive technologies and intergroup relations is expanding rapidly. The number of scientific articles on this topic has increased significantly in the last decade, reflecting both the advancement of technology and the growing interest of the disciplines. VR is now being tested in a wide range of contexts: diversity studies, educationpolicing, health care and conflict resolution.
The challenge is clear: Immersive technologies allow researchers to simulate social situations that cannot be recreated in real life.
A New Window on Human Relations
The dream that virtual reality can eliminate prejudice overnight may be naïve, but the technology offers something equivalent: a new way to observe the mechanics of the world. public life. Inside the headset, researchers can see how personalities change and how people react when faced with an unfamiliar perspective.
If used carefully, immersive technologies can remove magic borders between “us” and “them,” but they can help us better understand those boundaries and perhaps even learn how to cross them.
