Playing a virtual reality game can increase a person's sense of altruism and influence levels of empathy, according to a new study from University of Oregon researchers.
The study tracked participants' feelings as played through a virtual reality scenario in which they helped a boy find his lost dog. The results, published in Frontiers in Virtual Reality, suggest that immersive games can motivate people to help, even if they can't directly relate to someone else's emotions.
UO communication and media studies expert Samantha Lorenzo is not a gamer, but she knows the power of a good story. Lorenzo has widely studied the social and psychological impacts of different forms of communication and has seen how narratives can play a big role in how people understand information. So when she encountered research about how games can be used for social and emotional benefits, she started getting curious.
She wondered whether narrative-driven games could be used to influence emotional processes, like altruism and empathy. She was especially interested in virtual reality, or VR, due to the immersive nature of the platform, which she theorized could enhance the emotional experience for players, leading to more positive outcomes and longer-lasting effects.
The Characters of Empathy in Action
"I had an idea that VR might be an effective tool to influence people's ability to want to help others and better understand other people's perspectives," Lorenzo said. "I wanted to explore possible behavioral changes from immersive environments and the underlying mechanisms that foster altruistic engagement within, and beyond, the gaming world."
She teamed up with Danny Pimentel, assistant professor at the School of Journalism and Communication. He also codirects the Oregon Reality Lab, where UO students and researchers can develop virtual-, augmented- and mixed-reality media and test their capacity to address social, environmental and business problems.
The research team, led by Lorenzo, decided to explore these questions by developing a narrative-driven VR game that would immerse players in an emotional storyline, so they could analyze whether that gaming experience affected the player's levels of empathy and altruism. A trio of UO graduate students were instrumental in designing and developing the game.
In their game, Empathy in Action, players enter a neighborhood community where they encounter Alden, a young boy who just lost his dog, Buddy. Players are faced with a range of tasks, both physical and emotional, including searching for clues and deciding whether, and how, to comfort the distraught child.
The researchers considered a few different narratives for the game but landed on the lost dog scenario because it felt like a believable storyline that could happen in real life, Lorenzo said. She and her team thought that a realistic narrative would be the most effective tool for helping people consider how they would actually react in a similar situation.
Both before and after participants played the game, the researchers asked the players a series of questions to gauge whether, and how, the game influenced their levels of empathy and altruism.
"We wanted to see if the game shifted their motivation to help others and if it affected their ability to understand other people's emotions," Lorenzo said.
Surprisingly, the team found that a person's sense of empathy and altruism don't always increase together.
People's sense of altruism did go up in the study, but whether they felt greater empathy was more complicated, Lorenzo explained. The researchers saw significantly higher ratings of cognitive empathy, which is an ability to recognize and understand someone else's feelings. But there was a decline in affective empathy, where a person actually feels the sadness that another person is feeling.
Their data suggested that people might feel moved to help, even if they may not feel greater empathy for those in need.
"People knew that this was a sad situation and that's why they wanted to help," she said. However, they didn't directly feel the same sadness Alden did about losing his dog.
As part of the study, participants suggested potential applications for immersive digital games like Empathy in Action. Their recommendations included classrooms and other learning environments, therapeutic or rehabilitative settings, and conflict-resolution trainings.
Lorenzo stresses that this was an exploratory study, to probe whether VR has the power to influence altruism and empathy, and there's a lot of room for further research. She believes different storylines could produce different findings. And she personally hopes to build on it through her public health research to see how immersive, narrative-driven interventions could be used for things like understanding and coping with medical challenges.
"This gaming technology is new and exciting, and there's a lot of potential for researchers to keep exploring how immersive media can be leveraged for social good," she said.
This research was supported by a grant from the Center for Science Communication Research in the School of Journalism and Communication at the University of Oregon.
