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Study of men who embodied a young woman in VR finds they felt disgust & anger when catcalled
(lemmy.blahaj.zone)
this post was submitted on 30 Dec 2025
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I wish they had tested all 8 scenarios: Male/female participant, male/female body, catcalled/not catcalled.
Because even as a man I don't feel comfortable being alone at a subway station at night. Nor can I imagine would I then enjoy being catcalled.
I wonder how much your VR body seen in a mirror affects this. My gut says not a lot but more data would've been great.
Now, if your own VR body does affect your reaction there must be bodies which maximize/minimize reactions. That'd be fun to test. You don't even have to limit yourself to human bodies, what if you're, say, a dinosaur (with body height still being the same)?
But that would be actual science and not whatever the slop study in the article is.
I feel like if you’re going to slag off the study as “slop” you should at least follow the links to the study itself where you can see that they did in fact have a control group who were posed general questions instead of catcalling. They didn’t switch genders because that wasn’t the purpose of the study.
The purpose of the study being to get the results they wanted to get. That's not science.
It's basically a study of "do people like being assaulted". No one does regardless of gender, but they took that as women don't like being assaulted and men pretending to be women don't like being assaulted. Therefore men pretending to be women in VR don't like to be assaulted.
What sort of conclusion is that.
It would help to read the study so you don't have to be wrong about things.
I did read it. It's very very long though have you read all of it, I started to get bored when they started showing really complicated diagrams with no real explanation as to how they came to those conclusions.
Social studies is like that, it's very much couched in the sort of science that you would normally expect of physics or engineering but all it's conclusions are fuzzy but they come out with these concrete graphs to explain very personal responses. I find it to be intellectually dishonest to suggest that you can represent the world like that
"I don't understand it so it's wrong," isn't a great way to prove a point.
Social studies? Do you mean the neurology? Or the psychology? You know "fuzzy logic" is a form of math, right?
Maybe you got bored when they explained what metrics they used and how they applied them.
Thats a slop study through and through
While my first reaction was the same - "how would they react in male avatars?", that doesn't seem to be the point at all of this study but rather the potential of VR to change the subjects behaviour in real life by helping empathy along.
That's fair, I only really glossed over the study.
But still, have they actually collected data to support illiciting these emotions works as a "potential strategy to promote behavioral change"? In the study, I haven't found anything like a pre and post experiment survey showing a different attitude towards catcalling. In my mind that's required to demonstrate the VR experiment is such a strategy.
And catcalled by M & F I guess?
I can where to say this. This is anything but science. Entertainment at best.