A Virtual Trick to Remove Racial Bias

A team of scientists has used full-body immersive virtual reality to dive deep into some of the potential contributors to racial bias. Beatrice S. Hasler, Bernhard Spanlang, and Mel Slater (affiliated with the Sammy Ofer School of Communications of Israel, the University of Barcelona and ICREA in Spain, and University College London in the UK) conducted a study that assigned two different VR bodies to each participant, one black and one white, to see how skin color affected their behavior. That’s a remarkable statement if you read it back slowly, so let’s first unpack its meaning.

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Are they getting people to imagine themselves as different colored people in a VR environment?

Tau.Neutrino said:

Are they getting people to imagine themselves as different colored people in a VR environment?

Not quite.

“Instead of imagining how it would be to be someone else, we actually put people into a situation of ‘being’ a member of the out-group through virtual embodiment. Embodiment in a life-sized virtual body that is perceived from first person perspective as visually substituting the person’s real body has been shown to lead to an illusion of ownership over the virtual body . Moreover, through the application of real-time motion capture, the virtual body can be programmed to move synchronously and in correspondence with real body movements. In this case there is also strong agency with respect to the virtual body, so that participants attribute actions of the virtual body to themselves.”

The “illusion of ownership over the virtual body” isn’t really something that requires actively using ones imagination – it just happens.

The quote I gave above is from the paper:

http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0174965

I bet they can’t tell the difference between racial bias and ignorance.

Good idea, though.