Wagner James Au / New World Notes

Above: Male test subject in VR given the option to "shock" female avatar 

I recently told you about the VR-based recreation of Milgram’s infamous shock experiment, in which test subjects became traumatized, even knowing that the victim of their shocks was only an avatar. In an equally remarkable follow-up study, researchers recently used this VR Milgram's scenario to test another hypothesis: Would a traumatizing experience in VR influence how many shocks a volunteer would subsequently give out? 

"Milgram can be used as a moral thermometer of empathy,"  as Dr. Mar Gonzalez-Franco at Microsoft Research, a co-author of the original study, explains to me. "The idea is that if you have some priming experience before doing the Milgram test, it will change your performance. In this case, through triggering empathy."

In the follow-up study led by her co-author, Dr. Mel Slater at the University of Barcelona, this priming experience was a virtual reality simulation of sexual harassment. In it, a group of men in a public space become increasingly hostile to a nearby woman (video below): 

Dr. Slater's volunteers, all male, were asked to experience this harassment scenario from the point of view of a harasser — or alternately, from the point of view of the female victim.  As summarized in a recent issue of Nature in which Dr. Slate reported his teams' findings:

20 participants were arbitrarily assigned to each of the three groups, depending on the order in which they arrived at the laboratory. The experiment was designed to test whether there would be differences in the subsequent behaviour of men towards a women as a victim – and in particular the hypothesis was that those who had been in the Woman condition would subsequently be less likely to be aggressive towards a woman, against the background of male group pressure.

After this experience, the volunteers were then placed in the VR Milgram's test, and given the option to shock the virtual victim — a woman avatar — whenever instructed by researchers. (See image above.) Would the volunteers' propensity to administer electric shocks differ, based on whether they had just experienced virtual harassment, or as one the perpetrators of that harassment?

The difference in shock rates, as Dr. Gonzalez-Franco tells me, "were significant":

"The people who had been on the receiving end of the harassing gave a median of ten shocks, while the people in the harasser [avatar] doubled the number of shocks and gave twenty." (Emphasis mine.)

In other words, the men who had just experienced the stress and trauma of harassment meted out much less punishment — or if you prefer, the perpetrators of stress and trauma were twice as likely to unleash even more pain.

You can read the full study on Nature. While it's too early to say how much this increase in empathy might carry over into the real world, it's enough to suggest that there's something powerful at work here that deserves far more attention. VR gives us the ability to experience phenomena from another person's point of view; what if it also enables us to make that person's perspective part of our conscience?

Image via Nature.