Can people learn empathy through the use of virtual reality? Recall a time when you were reading a novel or watching a powerful scene in a movie which moved you to tears. This scene might have made you reflect on your own life and your relation to others within it, causing you to be overwhelmed with emotions in that brief moment. Imagine this effect amplified to a more prolonged and intimate level. We all know the phrase “walk a mile in someone’s shoes”, but current trends in VR are making it more of a literal possibility. Empathy is key in fostering social connections with others. It allows a much higher degree of interpersonal understanding than does simple communication. Hearing sad stories might give us pause for a moment, but it’s easy to quickly return focus to our own lives. However, to truly relate to those stories on a personal level and actually feel what someone is feeling is a powerful force for social progress. After all, humans are a sum of our experiences, therefore to experience something is more impactful than to simply imagine it.
New VR experiences and studies are occurring which show promise in helping people understand experiences of the homeless, victims of war, elders with dementia, prison life and more. Immersive technologies could be becoming more popular in the field of journalism. What better way to convey the news than placing people in the center of the world’s most pressing issues? Back in the 1960s Marshall McLuhan told us “the medium is the message”. Virtual reality is becoming the new medium to deliver the message, and is a message in itself that points to the human desire to understand things in an ever-increasing depth. It has potential to reshape journalism in a way that allows society to interact with news and information in exciting ways. Tapping into multiple senses and throwing the viewer into the story can give the news an unprecedented feeling of realness, and this has the power to dramatically alter the relationship between audience and content.
In our current political climate there exists so much vitriol over the many immigrants and refugees coming to the United States. Many Americans are calling for closed borders, often painting refugees in a very negative light. Project Syria, a 2014 journalism study from Nonny de La Peña, is a VR experience that places you in the shoes of a Syrian child in the middle of a war-torn landscape. It is a two-part experience. The first part takes place in a busy street of Aleppo. In the middle of singing a rocket explodes near you filling your view with dust and debris.You are dazed, shellshocked, and hear high pitch ringing in your ears. The people around you are running, screaming, crying, and lying on the ground dead. The second part places you in the middle of a refuge camp as the number of refugees around you grows exponentially.
You can experience solitary confinement with The Guardian’s 6 x 9. This is a 360 VR video that has you sitting a 6 foot by 9 foot sterile room as prison stats are presented to you as screams and bangs echo down the corridors. Various narrators give some reasons why people are sent into solitary confinement, and sometimes these reasons are as trivial as looking at a guard the wrong way or taking extra toilet paper. A prisoner could be serving a year-sentence initially, but end up serving years more existing in this bleak state of despair called solitary. At one point you begin experiencing symptoms of psychosis: floating in the air, seeing cracks running down the walls, blurred vision, auditory hallucinations all around you, etc.
Stanford University’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab released Becoming Homeless: A Human Experience. The experiment posits that there is a misconception that becoming homeless is due to your personal choices and seeks to counter that argument. In this experience you are assuming the role of someone who can no longer afford their home. You sell objects in your home to offset owed rent and you watch as your belongings begin to dwindle. The goal of this type of experience is to help to break down the barrier of the “us versus them” mentality. Results of this study revealed that participants were more likely to agree with statements that empathized with the plight of the homeless, and these attitudes were shown to continue on afterwards. As part of the study, participants of the VR group and others from a condition group (who only read a narrative) were asked to sign a petition supporting affordable housing. 82% of the VR participants signed versus 67% of those that only read a narrative. In the second study, 85% of the VR participants signed, whereas only 63% of the narrative participants did.
Although, there are blunders in the mission to elect VR as the ultimate tool for generating empathy as shown during a livestream by Facebook’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, and head of social virtual reality, Rachel Franklin. Their intent was to demonstrate the empathetic qualities of VR as they toured a post-hurricane, flooded Puerto Rico. However, it came off as tone-deaf and self-promoting. The two smiled and high-fived in front of flooded homes and people in turmoil. Their positive attitudes superimposed on a backdrop of a devastated community was truly in bad taste. Worst of all, their attempt to display empathy through promotional use made the concept look tacky. What it looked like was cheap disaster tourism. They did not seem to empathize with anything going on around them in the virtual space. You could tell their head space was still locked back into the comfort of their real-life homes, which is about the farthest thing away from the horrendous conditions being displayed on screen. They even seemingly become bored at one point and teleport back to their luxurious offices. The charade cheapened the whole promise of the experience.
This is the issue with VR being completely immersive as to create pure empathy. In Postcinematic Vision: The Coevolution of Moving-Image Media and the Spectator, Lev Manovich remarks, “regardless of what visual forms can be presented before the eye (diagrams, photographs, film images), they are subjected to complicated processing by the nervous system, which constructs its own internal representations”. It’s all about our personal subjectivity of individual consciousness. Each human interprets events in an entirely unique way. It may have been Zuckerberg’s conscious intention to make his viewers empathize by tricking them into believing they are in a disaster zone, but it’s only a trick. The fact that you can take the VR headset off and teleport back to your safety zone detracts from the experience.
But this personal subjectivity is what makes us unique individuals. In the 1980s, Jaron Lanier mused about VR tech eventually being completely fused with mental processes. He talked about an age of “post-symbolic communication” that invalidates simple language allowing everyone to be connected and sharing the same understanding — ‘perfect empathy’. Lev Manovich seems to have a more dystopian take on Lanier’s idea: “why should there be any need for linguistic symbols if everyone rather than being locked into a ‘prison-house of language’, will happily live in the ultimate nightmare of democracy – the single mental space that is shared by everyone, and where every communicative act is always ideal”. I have to agree with Manovich lest humanity eventually transform into something like Star Trek’s ‘Borg Collective’.
The Zuckerberg incident makes one question the true intentions of some using VR for seemingly charitable reasons. Media theorist Daniel Rushkoff makes a point that “The ability to form empathy in a medium has much less to do with how many senses are involved and more to do with how much control the humans have over the exchange and over what they’re doing.” He states that while he believes there are indeed empathetic possibilities with VR that it doesn’t necessarily mean the utilization of more senses and improved fidelity results in a higher level of empathy. Rushkoff also worries that media and technology companies are “making it (VR) less about what people might do with such powerful tools, and more about what they can do to us or sell us, once we’ve jacked into a reality they control.”
At its current state, VR has a long way to go in making real progress in repairing the world’s empathy deficit. More research needs to be done on the long-term effects of VR experiences. At its current fidelity, one simulation is unlikely to have a serious lasting effect on one’s overall empathy, but if it were something that people were exposed to on a regularly basis then it does have potential to change the way people think and feel. There are two obvious sides to VR: escapism through entertainment and empathy through understanding. We must be able to separate the two and not allow VR’s empathetic potential to be overpowered by corporate desires.
References
Project Syria – https://docubase.mit.edu/project/project-syria/
Stanford – http://news.stanford.edu/2018/10/17/virtual-reality-can-help-make-people-empathetic/
The Guardian – https://www.theguardian.com/world/ng-interactive/2016/apr/27/6×9-a-virtual-experience-of-solitary-confinement
The Verge (on Zuckerberg) – https://www.theverge.com/2017/10/9/16450346/zuckerberg-facebook-spaces-puerto-rico-virtual-reality-hurricane
Lev Manovich’s ‘Postcinematic Vision: The Coevolution of Moving-Image Media and the Spectator’
Len Manovich’s ‘The Language of New Media’
Douglas Rushkoff, Guernica Magazine – https://www.guernicamag.com/ava-kofman-will-virtual-reality-make-us-feel-better/