This informal CPD article on Leveraging Empathy Through VR Storytelling Part 2 was provided by Moonhub, a software company creating bespoke VR training solutions to unlock your employee’s full potential.
Empathy in Virtual Reality
Empathy is a multidimensional concept that includes two facets: emotional empathy and cognitive empathy. Emotional empathy is essentially an emotional response, usually characterised by feelings of care and concern. Cognitive empathy relates to the ability of people to recognise and comprehend what other people are feeling. The latter is the key to unlocking the former’s full range of emotions.
Now let’s think of empathy as a muscle. Like muscles, studies show that empathy levels can be trained – increase or decrease them and they are massively affected by the sensitivity of the situation. These findings emphasise the engine that empathy can be in driving positive individual actions at both the micro and macro levels of society. In VRNF, experience sharing – designing the user as an active participant – has a twin-fold prospective outcome: mirror affective states and motivate avoidance behaviour, leading to unlearning and evolution in individual cognitive biases and intensification of prosocial behaviour.
Studies, however, have shown inconsistent results in the research investigating the effectiveness of VR in arousing empathy. A subgroup analysis reported that VR has the potential to improve emotional empathy, but not cognitive. Another meta-analysis found that VR experiences increased cognitive empathy, but not emotional. So which study is right?
There is inherently no right or wrong answer, as the results differ by the modality in which the VRNF content is presented to the user. Emotional empathy is quick and can be triggered by vivid, emotional scenes. Cognitive empathy, however, requires a mentalising effort from the user.
The challenges and limitations of VRNF
The main challenge of VRNF content producers thus is understanding that creating the environment is merely one side of the work. Content producers in this space will need to gamify the experience to put the spectator in the most advantageous position. Since the users are actors, they need to have more agency in shaping the world around them and directing the experience. By doing so, content producers can unleash emotional empathy - through powerful visual graphics, and cognitive empathy - through extensive interactivity.
Limitations of VRNF include context. The fear surrounding the experience is that it fails to address the systemic causes of the crises or falls in promoting the status quo. For effective cognitive empathy, producers will have the responsibility to provide knowledge post-experience to users to try and change the current situation. The goal thus is elevating the role of the user to pseudo-advocate, translating the work at generating equity and justice rather than just compassion.
We are not a logical species. We are psychological. And tapping into people’s emotions is a potent leverage. Users are more likely to share content and raise awareness on an issue that they feel close to or have experienced. Through VRNF, these experiences are brought directly to the users without having the distress of living under the conditions of the experience.
In 2015, Amnesty International reported that donations increased by 16% for participants of their Fear of the Sky VR experience. In 2014, NGO Pencils of Promise raised $2 million at a Wall Street gala attended by venture capitalists and tech entrepreneurs who were immersed in VR headsets to see the impact of the non-profit in building schools and training teachers in Laos, Guatemala, Nicaragua, and Ghana.
The Future of VR Storytelling
Further research is required to understand the effects of this new type of content in regards to empathy, and in a wider scope, prosocial behaviour, however, the potentiality of VRNF are limitless. Particularly, producers have almost carte blanche on how to best approach audiences visually, how audiences can technically actively participate and how to ethically portray this new type of storytelling. This is an expansive opportunity in the fields of education and social justice to elevate sensitive topics in an immersive mode for greater reception and retention.
VRNF might not be mainstream today, but it will be the future.
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