So now, we all know the technical setup of VR to achieve this embodiment illusion.
But I know you've been doing some really interesting work which basically is about using
this illusion to actually change people's attitude, behavior, and cognition.
Can you share some of these interesting experiment with us here?
Yes. This is the other point of VR which is difficult to do with physical props.
You can look down,
you can see a virtual body replacing a real body but we can also program it.
There's a mirror in front of you that you can see
a reflection of your virtual body in the mirror, a virtual mirror.
Once again, as I move my real body,
I would see my virtual body from first person perspective doing the
same and I would also see my reflection in the mirror doing the same,
or the reflection of my virtual body.
Remember, this is life-sized,
it's the same size as your real body.
Or it can be different sizes from your real body but basically, it's life-size.
If you can do that,
you can also do something else which is you can change the body.
It doesn't have to look anything like you.
I might be a man and I looked down and I have
a female body or a child body or a body of a different race.
What we became interested in is,
what happens when you embody someone in a virtual body,
you give them this feeling of body ownership,
that this body is theirs,
and the body is nothing like theirs, is somehow different.
It's different in various ways.
We've done various different studies on this.
I want to mention is the first one, the adult-child one.
What we did is we took out adults and we put them in a child body.
When they look down to themselves,
they look a childlike body.
Children have different proportions of the body than adults do,
so it looked childlike.
They soar in a mirror as well.
And as they move, the virtual body move the same.
Both seen from first person perspective and in the mirror.
So in that experiment, we had two groups.
One group had the virtual body as the child body, and the other group,
everything was the same but their virtual body was
an adult body but deliberately shrunk down to the same size as the child.
So in other words, both had small bodies but one
was shaped like an adult body and one was shaped like a child body.
And what we were interested in was two things.
One was their sense of space and the second was their sense of identity.
What we did is before the experiment,
we trained people to measure
the sizes of objects in the environment by using their hands.
They'd see an object, we'd say,
"Put your hands in the same size of that object."
Then they go like this.
And then we give them feedback until eventually they learned how to do it pretty well.
And then I had this stimulation just five,
six minutes being in a virtual body,
a child body or an adult body of the same size.
Then at the end of that period, we did the same.
We asked them to use their hands to measure the size of objects.
And what we found is that although everybody as we
expected overestimated because they were smaller,
everyone was smaller, those in the child shaped body,
they over estimated more than double those who had been in the adult body.
So somehow, simply having the shape of that body had
altered their perception not just because of the size but because of the shape.
In that experiment, we've actually replicated
again recently and we've got the same results.
And the other thing is we did what was called an Implicit Association Test
which asked people to categorize us very rapidly aspects of their own identity.
Those who'd been in the child body,
they categorized themselves far more as
childlike than those who'd been in the adult body.
So this is one example.
Should I give some more examples?
Oh yes. I'd be really interested in you telling us about the racial bias one.
I think that's definitely one with very interesting social implications.
Yes. So I should say that one on
the child body has some practical applications because we did
a study where we took parents from a local school and we put them in a child body.
While they were in the child body,
in came a mother and the mother was either a nice mother or a nasty mother.
We had them two weeks running,
one week they had the nice mother,
next week the nasty mother or the other way around.
And what they came back and told us the second week,
whatever role that they did it in was that, "Wow.
This really affected me.
I realized how scary it was to be this little
being with this great big mother who was having to look up with."
And so during the week,
when I spoke to my child,
I got down on my knees and brought myself to the same height as the child.
I had a very interesting effect.
The whole experiment had a very interesting effect
on people's sense of empathy with their children.
The thing we moved on round about the same time was looking at racial bias.
As I said, if you have a virtual body,
you can program it to like whoever you want.
The important thing is it moves with you and you see
it from first person perspective and reflected in a mirror.
In a series of studies actually,
we took white people and we put them in a black body or a white body or a purple body,
various different types of bodies.
And before the experiment,
we measured their racial bias using what's called an Implicit Association Test.
You can find lots of information about the Implicit Association Test
on a website on Harvard and it's used a lot to study biases.
It's not a questionnaire,
it's a very rapid reaction time test.
Basically, if you're white and you categorize or you
join together or you associate
faster white faces with good attributes and black faces with bad attributes,
if you do that faster than if you associate
white faces with bad attributes and black faces with good attributes,
then it's indicating bias.
That you have somehow a preference for the white faces rather than the black faces.
The whole Implicit Association Test is based on this idea.
A week or a few days before the virtual reality experiment,
people do this test.
Then they come in, they have the virtual reality and they're
embodied in one of several different kinds of bodies.
Obviously, in a white body, in a black body,
sometimes we've used the purple body so we make sure
we're measuring race and not simply surprise or difference.
And what we found now with four or five replications,
we found that always if you spend a few minutes embodied in the black body,
when you come back even a week after doing the virtual reality exposure,
after having been exposed in a black body even a week later,
your racial bias is less than it was the week before that you'd ever did the exposure.
Most recently, we worked with Beatrice Hasler whose University near Tel Aviv called IDCH,
and again with Dr. Bernhard Spanlang who is in our lab.
We did another experiment where we embodied
people in black bodies or white bodies and they interacted
with a virtual partner and that virtual partner
one week was white and the following week was black or the other way around.
And what we found there is that when they interacted with a virtual partner,
they would unconsciously mimic the body postures and
behaviors of that virtual partner if they had the same virtual skin color.
So if I'm in a black body,
my virtual partner is black,
then unconsciously I would imitate her or him more than if
my virtual partner was white or if I'm in a white body and my virtual partner is white,
I would imitate them more than if my virtual partner was black.
So it's really the virtual identity dominates
how your social affiliation work in virtual reality.
Yes. And the mimicry as you actually know because you've worked on it yourself.
The mimicry is something very important
because unconscious mimicry is usually a sign of social harmony.
With these very, very simple techniques of being in
a black body and it moves like you do and you see it in a mirror that for a few minutes,
not talking about hours and hours,
that you adopt unconsciously these different behaviors.
And it's really important because it shows that although
racial bias we think is something very deep seated and can't be changed,
these kind of very simple multi-sensory tricks can somehow
implicitly alter because with
the mimicry it's very powerful because they don't know we were measuring mimicry.
They had no clue what this experiment was about.
Yet nevertheless, their behavior changed.
This is an example of something you can do in
virtual reality that you can't really do in any other way.
I mean it's like role playing but role playing is explicit, you know you're doing it.
Here, you're just in a body, you see it's black.
Some people say they don't even notice it and then somehow the behavior changes.
Right. So it's like your behavior changed subconsciously.
That's right. It's implicit.
It's not something explicit.
Very interesting.
