Beyond Virtual Reality: The Limits of Empathy and Perspective-Taking
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What is it like to be a cow? Researchers such as Jeremy Bailenson, the director of the Virtual Human Interaction Lab in California, and his colleagues at Stanford University created a simulation of a slaughterhouse. In a series of experiments, Bailenson invited people to don virtual reality (VR) headsets, and walk around on all fours to experience ‘what it’s like to be a cow that’s raised for dairy and for meat’. You go down to a trough, you put your head down and pretend to drink some water. You amble over to a pile of hay, you put your head down and you pretend to eat hay. For a time after their VR experience, people found themselves eating less meat. One subject remarked: ‘I truly felt like I was going to the slaughterhouse … and felt sad that as a cow I was going to die.’
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But we should be skeptical of these claims. While VR might help us to cultivate sympathy, it fails to generate true empathy. Empathy is what we use when we engage in perspective-taking. Sympathy, meanwhile, involves the capacities that help us feel for another. Empathy is very, very hard – and sometimes, it’s simply impossible. In his classic 1974 essay, the American philosopher Thomas Nagel argued that humans could not imagine what it was like to be a bat, even if we went to great lengths to try and live like one. A gap of understanding arises because our evolved way of being embodied and our very human, very self-reflective, and very personal life experiences shape the way the world seems to us. VR is a powerful tool, but it cannot alter basic biological embodiment or psychology. Human experiences are sufficiently unlike cow or bat experiences that it’s impossible for us to know what those experiences are like. But can’t VR at least help us take on the perspective of other people – such as those experiencing homelessness or racial discrimination? After all, two humans are much more alike than humans and cows.
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Conscious experiences acquire their meanings in part via panoply of nonconscious processes. These include not only your biology, but also your cultural concepts, past experiences, emotions, expectations and even features of the specific situations in which you find yourself. As the philosopher Alva Noë explains: perception is something we actively do, not something we passively experience. Our expectations, along with other background processes, help to determine how we understand the things that we see, hear, feel and think, and these processes vary from person to person. They are powerful enough to affect even seemingly nonconscious empathic processes. Imagine if I came to the conclusion that homelessness wasn’t that big a deal because I enjoyed the challenging puzzle elements in the VR experience ‘Becoming Homeless.’ Imagine if I believed I now had better insight into homelessness, and that it wasn’t as bad as I feared. I might change the way I thought about homelessness, and the sorts of policies I voted for. Such failures of sympathy, grounded in false beliefs about our VR’s ability to produce empathy, can be avoided. VR is an important tool, and research shows that it can radically affect the way we think about the world. But we shouldn’t be so quick to assume that it endows us with true, first-person, empathetic understanding. That would be bovine indeed.