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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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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.