How Virtual Reality Will Make Us More Compassionate

Virtual Reality has been dubbed the ’empathy machine’. And I believe it holds the key to making our society more fair and more just.

In another person’s shoes

The old saying goes, “you can’t understand someone until you’ve walked a mile in their shoes.”

The author of this immortal wisdom may be long gone, lost in the vast and dusty annals of history. But their message still rings true: shared experiences breed understanding.

But this wise saying ignores an important complexity: not all experiences can be shared. To borrow its metaphor: not all shoes can be swapped.

I might be able to see a movie with my wife or attend a cooking class with friends. But as a white, straight, cis-gendered man, I can’t simply choose to experience racist or homophobic abuse. To develop my own, inevitably inadequate understanding of those heinous experiences, I must rely on second-hand accounts.

I can watch Youtube videos or read blogs in which victims recount, with great bravery, the trauma of being assaulted, as Melania Geymonat and her partner Chris were on a Camden bus only last month. I support the practice of seeking out other people’s perspectives and experiences. In fact, I believe it’s a moral prerogative for all members of an inclusive and well-functioning society to do so.

The problem with sharing

Still, second-hand accounts are limited. Rarely can a story, a written recounting, or even a work of art convey the emotional aftermath of a horrific experience. Or, for that matter, the daily anxiety and frustration of a life spent in fear they might endure the same suffering again.

The sympathy we experience for another person depends, in part, on the clarity with which we understand their suffering. The more completely we see their experience, the greater our sympathy for its recipient. Technology can help us here, to close the experiential gap. The technology is VR, the so-called ‘empathy machine’.

When I say VR or virtual reality, I don’t mean the feeble, often nausea-inducing generation of gear available right now. The Oculus Rifts and PS VRs of this world. I mean hardware that’s a few years away that will truly immerse its users in sleek, smooth and photo-realistic environments.

This higher-tech VR could become a platform for exchanging near-perfect digital renderings of real life. When this is possible, people will be able to capture and exchange elements of their life in a way that simply wasn’t possible before.

The immediate and pressing application for this technology is clear: marginalised communities could use it to communicate the true weight of their marginalisation with those in a position to bring about change.

Academics at Stanford’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab are exploring this exact possibility. They developed an immersive VR experience called ‘Becoming Homeless’, where ‘users’ were shown a first-hand digital recreation of the roots of homelessness; losing a job, receiving an eviction notice, and so on. The result of the experience was:

“…longer-lasting compassion toward the homeless compared to those who explored other media versions of the VR scenario, like text”.

Subsequent experiments have shown that inhabiting a 65-year-old avatar of themselves encouraged subjects to save more for retirement and that seeing the world through the eyes of someone with colourblindness leads to more willingness to help people with the condition.

Exposing people to simulated experiences of the less fortunate, the mistreated, and even of themselves in a more vulnerable stage of life, created sympathy in the user. The old adage is true. Walking in someone else’s shoes is a potent vehicle for understanding. And it is more effective at courting sympathy than any other source of media. That’s including, I’m pained to concede, the written word.

“Empathy at scale”

Good news, indeed. Using virtual reality to incite empathy — which Stanford calls ‘empathy at scale’ — really works. And it could solve one of humanity’s greatest social injustices: that those in power are completely out of touch with the people most in need of their help.

The possibilities for ‘empathy at scale’ are mind-boggling. Charities could use virtual reality to step up fundraising efforts by incorporating immersive experiences into their advertising. I’m imagining, here, that VR headsets will become a staple piece of entertainment equipment, and that most people will have one or access to one.

If so, promoting a cause through virtual experience sharing could become as common as any other marketing tactic. Though, the question is then would we become numb to VR advertising over time, just as we’ve developed conscious blinkers to banner ads and popups?

There are plenty of other ways virtual reality could be used to create empathy amongst powerful people. Pressure groups beating the drum for important causes and underrepresented communities could canvas politicians by subjecting them to horrific simulations depicting the consequences of their actions. Or inaction.

I’d even suggest politicians should be forced, under electoral law, to sit through VR depictions showing the full range of their constituents’ experiences. The more senior the politician, the greater their impact, the bigger the range would be. This seems only logical. Politicians choose (and regularly squabble amongst themselves) to represent the electorate. It seems reasonable they would be required to have a firm handle on who they’re governing, what they need, and how their policies might impact them.

There’s something faintly tragic about needing technology to improve our empathy. And that empathy needs to be lured with special effects and visual trickery. In an ideal world, humans would have a natural stockpile of empathy. We would walk around with a surplus, ready to offer it to whoever needed it. Where there were gaps, we would work to close them with education and exploration.

But this is not an ideal world. This is our world. Maybe one day, though, we’ll prioritise our similarities and not our differences. We’ll remember, as my colleague Marty recently put it: ‘we’re all just people.’ In the meantime, hopefully, virtual reality can give us a much-needed nudge.

This article was first posted on granttree.co.uk on 4 July 2019. It was written by Robert Kellner, Head of Content.