"In the history of psychology, some of the deepest insights have come from asking a deceptively simple question: What if you could step into someone else's skin? For decades, psychologists have tried to make society more inclusive by asking people to imagine what life is like for someone different from them, but imagination only goes so far. You can picture what it might be like to roll into a job interview in a wheelchair, or to navigate a crowded hallway with limited mobility,"
"The team had a simple but ingenious idea: Place participants in a virtual wheelchair and give them a digital body that mirrored their own movements in real time. We aren't talking about passive videos: In the most immersive condition, participants wore a head-mounted display and physically pushed a wheelchair mounted on trainers. Their hands moved, the virtual wheels turned, and when they looked down, they saw their avatar's legs at rest. In that moment, the imagination experiment became an embodied one."
A 2019 study tested whether virtual reality embodiment could shift hidden automatic biases toward people with disabilities. Participants experienced a virtual wheelchair with a digital body mirroring their movements, ranging from desktop displays to head-mounted immersive setups with physical wheelchair trainers. Immersive VR produced stronger effects than desktop screens: participants who used head-mounted displays and physically pushed a wheelchair showed reduced implicit bias, improved memory for disability-related information, and increased empathy. The immersive condition linked sensorimotor feedback and visual perspective to behavioral change. Immersion converted abstract imagination into embodied experience, producing measurable changes in attitudes and cognition.
Read at Psychology Today
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]