Chicago Booth Review Podcast Can Virtual Reality Increase Empathy?

Alex Imas: There's good data suggesting that there's some sense that technology does draw us away from other people, because again, as you said, we're on their phone, we're spending less time socially, whether it's causal or not, this is just the facts of the day. People are spending more time alone than they used to.

Hal Weitzman: Technology is typically thought of as driving humans apart. We might sit together but look at our own individual phones, and the number of people reporting feeling lonely is on the increase. But could technology be used to promote a sense of empathy with others? Welcome to the Chicago Booth Review Podcast, where we bring you groundbreaking academic research in a clear and straightforward way. I'm Hal Weitzman, and today I'm talking with Chicago Booth's Alex Imas about an experiment he ran using an immersive virtual reality installation. Virtual reality, Imas reckons, could be used to help us relate to other people in real life. Alex Imas, welcome back to the Chicago Booth Review Podcast.

Alex Imas: Thank you. I'm happy to be here.

Hal Weitzman: Now listen, this is about empathy, your research is about empathy, and this is absolutely fascinating. I think we're going to have to give our listeners a little bit of the context of how you came to your conclusions, but basically you find that information about an out-group, we might need to explain what that means, can increase empathy when you present it with an experience that simulates the struggles of the people in that group. Let's just start with this. What question are you trying to answer? What is the driving question of this research?

Alex Imas: Well, the driving question of the research is how do you get people to help others? Just a very basic question. So in economics, we have certain models for how people are motivated to give to charity to help people who need help in their everyday lives. And those models tend to be, quote, unquote, "deterministic" in the sense that, look, I get a certain amount of value from me giving you a dollar or me helping you move, or something like that. And if I see that opportunity and that opportunity makes me happy, I'm going to take that opportunity every single time. And those are the sorts of models we have.

In psychology, there's been this emphasis on empathy, that I'm only going to be willing to help somebody else if I can be in their shoes and feel what they're feeling. If I feel their negative experience, whatever that might be, then I will be more likely to help them because I'm like, "Wow, I really feel bad about this and I have that negative emotion, and actually I'm really motivated to help them out." Whereas if I don't feel that empathy, I'm not going to do anything. I'm going to kind of cross the street. I'm going to avoid the person who's asking me for help.

So that sort of model is very different in the sense that I'm not going to seek out these opportunities to help other people. I'm only going to engage in those opportunities when that empathy is activated. So the question that we're motivating in this paper is, one, how do you potentially induce empathy? How does empathy work? Can you design some sort of intervention to generate empathy in particular contexts and show what that technology can potentially look like given what we have out there in the world today?

Hal Weitzman: Okay. Yeah, and it's fascinating. So tell us about this experiment design. It's quite unusual. It features this immersive virtual reality experiment. Just describe it. Describe how you designed this and what the participants are doing.

Alex Imas: So this is an actual museum installation by an award-winning director, Alejandro González Iñárritu. He designed a immersive experience of going through what migrants go through when they cross the border into the United States. So kind of like the harrowing process of actually crossing the river. And at the end of the experience, the migrants in the experience are apprehended by border patrol. So the idea is how do you simulate that experience for somebody who's not a migrant, who hasn't [inaudible 00:04:00].

Hal Weitzman: So just to understand, so he created an installation and you looked at it and said, "Ah, this might help people to become empathetic to people who are arriving in the US across the southern border."

Alex Imas: Right, exactly. So the cornerstone of empathy is to put yourself in the shoes of somebody else. So how do you put yourself into the shoes of somebody else without actually going through the experience? Well, one way that people have tried before is to write out a scenario or to think about it or to mentally simulate it. But now we have virtual reality technology where you can actually be in a fully immersive experience where everything around you looks exactly like what you would be experiencing if you were that individual. So if you were crossing the river, if you were trying to evade border patrol or something like that. So to put somebody in that experience and that generate empathy through going in that experience.

Hal Weitzman: So the installation is kind of like a game. I mean, you're wearing a headset? How are you...

Alex Imas: You're wearing a headset. So the full installation is the following. It's at a museum, first of all. So this is people selecting to see this installation that this very, very well-known director has designed. So you come in, you go into a room, and in the room you take off your shoes. It's a pretty cold room. And this is meant to simulate the cell that migrants are held in. So you don't know how long you're going to be in there. At some point somebody comes and gets you, takes you to a different room. The floor is covered in sand, it's a dark room. That's when you put on the headset.

So you put on the headset, and then you are kind of launched into this experience where you're immersed in a group of other migrants and you're crossing the river, you're walking with them, everybody's tired, people are injured, and at some point at the very end, you're kind of apprehended by border patrol in a very kind of cinematic way. At the end of that experience, you take off the headset, you go to a different room, you get your shoes, and you get debriefed by the staff of the museum. You're told this is actually based on true events with an actual group of migrants. So that's the experience as it stands wherever this installation was moved around.

Hal Weitzman: Okay. So tell us how you made that into an experiment.

Alex Imas: The way that we made it into an experiment is essentially we added a manipulation that we thought would be effective in order to enhancing the empathy that's generated through the experience. And then we added a step to see whether that empathy was effective in getting people to be more likely to help the migrants or undocumented immigrants in general. So the way that it worked is essentially we had the idea that giving people some information or context that would make the migrants more relatable to them before going through that entire experience would change the experience for them as they're going through with it, through it to basically facilitate being in these people's shoes.

So we gave people information about the migrants to give them basically, look, that these are individuals just like you and I, they have similar values. After giving them that information, they went through that experience and after they exit the experience, they basically filled out a questionnaire that included how much they'd be willing to donate to a charity that supports migrants, their attitudes towards migrants and so on and so forth. So that's how we took that installation and built an experiment around it.

Hal Weitzman: Okay. What was the first intervention then? So they're primed in some way?

Alex Imas: I wouldn't call it a prime. I would say that this is just information to draw their attention to certain aspects of this group that's not their own, so these are the people who are in the installation are not undocumented migrants, to draw attention to the aspects of the migrants that make them relatable during that experience. So then they can actually-

Hal Weitzman: Such as, can you give us an example?

Alex Imas: So the fact that they pay taxes to the government, just like you and I, when they work, they care about their children, they care about working hard, they share a lot of the same values as everybody else, and kind of putting that structure explicitly. So it's not so much that people don't have that information, it's just making that information salient right before they go through that experience.

Hal Weitzman: I see. Okay. So tell us about your main findings then from this.

Alex Imas: The main finding is that giving that sort of information before that experience increased positive attitudes by a significant margin, increased donations to organizations supporting migrant rights, compared to a condition where we gave them the exact same information but after the experience. So the main two manipulations were you get the experience in both conditions, but in some cases we give you the information before so we can enhance the experience versus we gave the exact same information after. So at the end, when you're making your decisions to donate money, you have gone through the exact same set of things, but the experience was different because you got the information either before or after that experience.

Hal Weitzman: Okay, so why? What is it about getting the information before that's so powerful?

Alex Imas: Because basically while you're going through the experience, it facilitates you to be in the shoes of the people that you're observing, that you're in the experience with, because you're paying attention to elements.

Hal Weitzman: So it just heightens your empathy, whereas afterwards it's just analytical or something.

Alex Imas: Exactly. Exactly. So you go through this experience, you still probably are affected by that experience, but you're probably not paying attention to the individuals as much. Maybe you're really focused on yourself going through the river and things like that. Whereas when we give them the information before, they're really focused on the individuals that they're with, and that generates the empathy to those individuals during the experience, which then bleeds into their decisions afterwards. Whereas if you get that information afterwards, the experience didn't create as much empathy and the information on their own just kind of looks like statistics. So that same package, the same set of experiences doesn't have the same effect.

Hal Weitzman: Fascinating. And you and I have talked about this interesting aspect of this just theoretically, is that technology we think of as something that separates people. We're all together and alone on our phones or whatever. Whereas this is an example of technology being used, and as you say, you couldn't do this on a stage. It would be crazy. It has to be done using this technology, and it really helps to deepen empathy.

Alex Imas: Right. Exactly. So I think there's good data suggesting that there's some sense that technology does draw us away from other people because again, as you said, we're on their phone, we're spending less time socially, whether it's causal or not, this is just the facts of the day. People are spending more time alone than they used to. And the technology like virtual reality could potentially enhance empathy towards particular groups. Now, is it a stand-in for social interactions? I don't think so. I don't think that's the case. I think socialization is very important and things like that. But I think the promise of this technology is to potentially put you in the shoes of individuals that you might not otherwise encounter.

Hal Weitzman: And I'm wondering, something about the virtual reality that really plunges you into this immersive experience, which just wouldn't be the same if it was kind of a role-play. If you gave people a scenario and asked them to work with other people, it wouldn't quite be the same as being plunged into that using the technology.

Alex Imas: Right, exactly. I mean, the sensory experience of being surrounded by a pulsating river and people next to you being injured and you being able to turn your body, and it's as if you're really in that situation. I mean, it's just a paradigm shift in terms of the actual experience to role-playing that scenario, or even virtual reality a few years ago. I mean, the technology has just come so far.

Hal Weitzman: If you're enjoying this podcast, there's another University of Chicago Podcast Network show that you should check out. It's called Not Another Politics Podcast. Not Another Politics Podcast provides a fresh perspective on the biggest political stories, not through opinions and anecdotes, but through rigorous scholarship, massive data sets, and a deep knowledge of theory. If you want to understand the political science behind the political headlines, then listen to Not Another Politics Podcast, part of the University of Chicago Podcast Network.

Alex Imas, in the first half we talked about your fascinating research about empathy and using virtual reality to enhance empathy, which really sounds counterintuitive, but you are now in the process of replicating this experiment in a lab. Tell us about what you're doing there and what you hope to discover.

Alex Imas: Yeah, so there's two parts to this. So one thing is we're trying to do is to see whether we can replicate just kind of the basic idea about giving people an experience that somebody else is going through, and based on that experience, whether giving them information that makes the other, really, the other, more relatable before going through that experience generates more empathy, and whether that increase in empathy is driven by this increase in relatability, the extent to which you [inaudible 00:12:51].

Hal Weitzman: And as you explained in the first half, the timing is critical here, isn't it.

Alex Imas: Exactly. And the main kind of difference between the treatments that we're exploring is when you see that information. Whether that same information is given to you before the experience, so it changes the experience, changes the way that you observe things in that environment compared to giving that same information after where basically the experience is the same as if you didn't get the information in the first place because obviously it comes after the experience. And what we see in the lab is we are able to replicate a similar effect as far as the timing of information as what we observed in the virtual reality. Obviously there's a one big, big, big, big difference. There's no main effect of the experience because the experience is not immersive. So there's an effect of information of when you get the information so there's more empathy. But those levels are quite different from what we saw in that field study because again, in that field study, the immersive experience was really what generated that big, big overall spike in empathy.

Hal Weitzman: Okay. And as you said there, relatability is kind of that key point here. I mean, if it's not too silly a question, why is relatability so important?

Alex Imas: Well, you can't put yourself in somebody's shoes if you just don't really relate to them at all, if you just view them as another. It's just very difficult for if you see somebody as completely dissimilar to you and they're going through something, the reaction to that is essentially to say, "Look, that sucks," and move on with your day. Whereas if you view somebody as similar, as human just like yourself, the reaction is empathy in the sense that, "Wow, I'm actually kind of experiencing what they're going through."

Hal Weitzman: But there is pity. I mean, people give money to all sorts of charities that deal with animals, for example. So are they relating to the animals' experience or are they just pitying them?

Alex Imas: Yeah, I mean, there's other motives to, basically, if you really care about the welfare of somebody else just like from a fundamental level because these are your true values, then you will be motivated to give money to charity. So we're not saying that all helping behavior, all pro-social behavior, needs empathy. Clearly that's not true. The effective altruist movement is built around the idea that we should not have empathy when we're giving. We should be giving where that donation is going to help the most. And empathy is something we want to avoid because what is empathy? Paul Bloom has a whole book that says we should try to avoid empathy when we're thinking about giving and helping because empathy is naturally driven towards individuals who are in our in-group precisely because of the relatability factor. What we're doing here is that we can simulate relatability towards somebody who's not normally part of our in-group.

Hal Weitzman: Okay. So how deep is relatability? The person could really live in a completely different environment I'm totally unfamiliar with, we have no real connection at all, but we're human beings. We all have to face some struggles on a basic level, some needs that need to be met. If the other person isn't meeting their needs, can I relate to that?

Alex Imas: The thing about relatability is it's very, very malleable. It depends on what attributes you're paying attention to. The whole idea of dehumanizing somebody is to say, "Here are the attributes that you should be paying attention to, and they are very different than your own." Now somebody else can say, "Hey, wait a second, take that same individual, let's switch attention to the other set of attributes. We overlap on these. Now I relate to that individual and I'll have very different attitudes." So the whole idea of dehumanization is basically doing the opposite of what we're trying to do in this experiment, is to take relatability and shift attention to the parts where you can't relate on, and that actually generates more antisocial behavior.

Hal Weitzman: It's fascinating this idea about relatability, and you said about all the taboos to do with relatability. I only care about people if they're in my group and that kind of thing. Does that mean, or does that suggest that there is a kind of self-regarding nature to empathy or relatability? I only care if people who are like me?

Alex Imas: Yeah, I mean, the person that you're most empathetic to is yourself. So me tomorrow, I'm very empathetic to that person because they're very similar to me and I want to be nice to them, whereas somebody else is less relatable to you. But then there's gradients. So my children are more relatable to me than somebody else's children. Somebody in my in-groups or somebody in my neighborhood is more relatable to me than somebody in a different neighborhood or somebody across the country. So there's this gradient in relatability that's kind of where we start, and you can manipulate that relatability through shifting attention to different attributes.

Hal Weitzman: So how do you measure relatability?

Alex Imas: We just adopt the scale from psychology. So essentially you could just ask a question, to what extent do you relate to the circumstances of this other individual? So we see whether our intervention here being the information before the experience moves the extent to which people can relate to the individual.

Hal Weitzman: Okay. Now you use data on donations to countries affected by natural disasters, and another survey that measured perceived similarity. So how does the real world data support your research findings?

Alex Imas: So there the idea with real world data, we can't obviously manipulate what information people see or don't see, their experiences. So we use exogenous variation in the extent to which they interact with people of the group that's being targeted by the natural disaster in their everyday lives or in a particular instance. And what we see is that being exposed to individuals from that group makes you empathetic to the individuals across the world from the similar group. So if, for example, there's an earthquake in India, if I interact with somebody of Indian descent in my everyday life, I'm more empathetic to the people in India and I'm more likely to donate to them because I can basically, by seeing this individual in my everyday life, I can relate to them.

Hal Weitzman: Just someone of Indian descent. It doesn't have to be someone who's actually from India.

Alex Imas: No. Yeah.

Hal Weitzman: Okay. That's fascinating. So I know you're working on some follow-up work, thinking about how you might scale this, right? This was one installation. Tell us a little bit about that, how you could use tech essentially to decrease tension between groups. How would that work?

Alex Imas: Yeah. I mean, our grand idea is to, because this technology is available, very widely available, to some extent, I mean, it's obviously still expensive, but you can buy it in a store. You can buy a very, very, very high quality VR headset at your store. You can basically scale this up by creating immersive experiences of what other groups are going through, taking our intervention and potentially decreasing some sort of in-group, out-group tensions where individuals may have some tension or may have negative attitudes towards a different group, and we can basically take the experiment that we ran with the installation and use that as an intervention for people to be more empathetic to other people in their everyday lives or to other people across the world.

Hal Weitzman: Okay. So are you going to test that in the United States or somewhere else?

Alex Imas: Right now we're kind of doing a combination of both. We're going to be testing that in underserved and vulnerable populations of the United States, as well as refugee populations outside of the United States.

Hal Weitzman: Okay. We'll have to be back when you do that work. It's fascinating using technology to bring people closer together. It's what it should all be about, right?

Alex Imas: Yeah. Hopefully more of that, less of the other stuff.

Hal Weitzman: That's it for this episode of the Chicago Booth Review Podcast, part of the University of Chicago Podcast Network. For more research, analysis, and insights, visit our website at chicagobooth.edu/review. When you're there, sign up for our weekly newsletter so you never miss the latest in business-focused academic research.

This episode was produced by Josh Stunkel. If you enjoyed it, please subscribe, and please do leave us a five-star review. Until next time, I'm Hal Weitzman. Thanks for listening.