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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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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.
Irrelevant is too strong a word given the opportunities in VR for training or even therapy... but you have a point.