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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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Oh this is such nonsense.
They basically decided "what if we tested a scenario that has been happening in ChatVR for about 10 years."
When I play a shooting game in VR I don't think I'm going to die, I do not experience fear. Any claims along those lines are at best overstated and at worst straight up lies.
Also what's this research supposed to prove anyway?
to fight an anecdote with an anecdote - when i play games sure i don't experience the fear of death, but i do experience compassion towards what i'm fully aware is a bunch of pixels & lines of code presented to me as a character in a video game. and i experience the thrill of discovery or a tough fight with a boss. the more i'm immersed in a game the deeper emotions i feel.
and VR in particular is much more immersive. even in a game like Beatsaber, which doesn't aim at realism, your brain interprets the boxes coming at you as actual objects about to slam into your face. you intuitively attempt to dodge them, especially when you're in the flow state of playing.
games can elicit emotions, and VR games can do it in an even stronger way. from my perspective, there is no reason to doubt the results of this study, especially if the fear response wasn't measured through a subjective report of emotions, but through observing the physiological effects fear has on the body.
the research is supposed to highlight - not prove, there is nothing to prove, it's a fact - how much fear women and girls go through in their daily lives, that men or boys don't have to worry about
Turn your logic around. If men feel the fear when it is just a simulation then real life for women is much worse.
Ah yes, the ever popular "I've never experienced it, so it doesn't exist" argument.
Where did I make that arguement.
VR is not the real world. It's not the holiday so you can't turn off safety protocols to simulate real world threats.
Did you forget to read your own comment? Because this is you saying that the study is wrong because of your limited personal experience, which no one cares about.
Your anecdote does not invalidate data
Who cares what you experience in the context of this study? Why is your input here useful in the context of the discussion? What does this statement add? Why did you say this? Why would anyone here want to know this?
He assumes that the feelings were not real because he doesn't have feelings in VR. If true for everybody that would invalidate the results.
Too many layers of ego death for him to answer that (it's obviously a dude with that level of self-centered ignorance).
Perhaps you are a sociopath?
You need to learn what sociopath means.
This is a dumb test. How people react in VR is not relevant to the real world.
So dumb. They stupidly cited studies about how the same therapy has applied to the real world, and other possible applications. They even had a section about testing embodiment in their VR scenario, talked about neurology, and used multiple metrics to compare the before and after for both groups.
I guess anything can be dumb if you don't read it.
Talking about neurology doesn't automatically validate their method though. I'm not an expert in this field but my impression is that the researchers make a lot of assumptions that I'd describe as shortcuts; gloss over the differences that they found between the experimental and control groups; and then reach a lot with their conclusion.
One thing that stands out to me is the identification of feelings of disgust and anger to support that the VR setting can be used to elicit social change. This implies that the participants would not have felt disgust or anger had their avatar been male; or if it was a normal videogame; or if this wasn't a game at all but a film instead; or if this wasn't audiovisual but a book instead...
I don't think they did anything to substantiate that line of thinking, and I'm not convinced by the various psychological scales that they used to support the connection they made. As far as I'm concerned these same men could have responded with disgust just by hearing a retelling of a similar event by a random stranger. The study at least does nothing to lead me to assume otherwise.
The disgust, fear and anger responses are at the core of the argument to support their central thesis that "first-person virtual embodiment of a female target of catcalling is a useful method for eliciting morally salient negative emotions in male participants". But my understanding of their methodology leaves me unimpressed and unconvinced.
Why don't you trust their metrics? If you don't think the tests were accurate measurements, what would work better?
They used neurolinguistics and neural pathway mapping, there's a whole section on it.
Testing one thing by no means implies any other method wouldn't have proven the same thing. That's... that's not how studies work. They're testing the efficacy of their methods.
That's the hypothesis, not a thesis.
Genuinely, I'm not sure how you come to that conclusion from reading the paper, it's very much not what the authors say. It never makes the claim that they wouldn't have also felt that disgust and anger in an altered situation (male avatar etc.), only that there was a difference between the control group and the catcalled group, and that the difference was observable using their novel (and really cool) VR+AI methodology. That's quite explicitly their entire thesis. They don't investigate other scenarios, presumably because it was outside the scope of the research.
The conclusion from the paper:
They don't say this can be used to fix catcalling or improve society on it's own, just that the results seem to indicate there is a basis to believe that VR can elicit varying emotional responses between different scenarios and that we can measure the differences in reaction.
Here's how I came to that conclusion.
That's... the hypothesis.
Ok lol not sure where this is going, but we're done.
It speaks to a truly fundemental lack of understanding of the scientific method, given you're criticizing them for their hypothesis and presenting it like it's their conclusion. That's just not how science works.
This is you:
So you're talking about my reading on the paper, not the paper's conclusion.
You continued to to make this claim:
Which is exactly what they in fact said in their hypothesis.
Oh and your disrespectful tone doesn't do you any favors. Lack of understanding of the scientific method my balls, try learning how language works.
Yes, because your conclusion of what the paper is saying is absolutely not what the paper actually says.
Yes, in their hypothesis. It seems evident that you don't know what a hypothesis is in a scientific paper given you keep incorrectly presenting something taken from the hypothesis as a claim the authors are making.
This is so basic it's literally taught in the first grade. You have absolutely no grounds from which to criticize this article if you do not even understand the basic structures of scientific inquiry, foremost in this particular discussion that the ideas in a hypothesis are by no means automatically going to be reflected in the conclusion.
You're embarrasing yourself. The authors claim that their hypothesis was supported in their conclusion.
This is in contrast to your statement:
Now quit your bullshit and fuck off.
I've never once claimed (or implied) that the author's hypothesis wasn't supported by their conclusion, just that basing your criticisms off the hypothesis belies a total lack of understanding for how the scientific process works - and showed that at that point you hadn't even read the paper, or you could have simply quoted the relevant portion from the conclusion.
What I initially was pointing out is that this criticism,
was completely baseless. It still is, too.
(my statement and the author's conclusions absolutely agree, as well. I don't... see how you could misinterpret that. It's really explicitly clear.)
Irrelevant is too strong a word given the opportunities in VR for training or even therapy... but you have a point.
Training and therapy absolutely. But this is about empathy, they are claiming the people are more empathetic when they experience a situation in VR than if they haven't experienced that situation ever in any medium.
I don't believe they've demonstrated that.
At best they've demonstrated the people are empathetic but they might be anyway. They definitely haven't demonstrated that that's a result of the VR experience. To do that they would have had to have taken some sort of test both before and after the VR experience to see if their attitudes have changed.
Training and therapy are appropriate uses for VR because they don't need to demonstrate that they are better than real world alternatives, because the benefit they have is cost. They are cheaper in VR than they are in the real world, that's the only metric they need to pass.