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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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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.
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.
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.)
So instead of like... Convincing people on the merits of your arugment and rhetorical skill, you're just trying to bully someone into letting you pretend you're right?
Kinda a shitty thing to do.
If it's bullshit, feel free to refute it. Please, I welcome it. But tellingly, you're not doing that.
(Edit: Oh. Well hmm. If you ever get back to this I do welcome a good-faith discussion on why your claim is off base. )
For the sake of readability I've broken this down into sections:
Part I
Nah, sorry, I'm very clearly not doing that. I've never once said you're not defending your argument - defending it really poorly sure, but you're obviously defending it. What I have said is that your argument is faulty, that you yourself have made comically basic errors in reasoning that bely a wild unfamiliarity with the topic you're criticizing, and that you pivoted towards attempting to bully someone else into acquiescence to your position not based on the merits of your reasoning but on your own extremely aggressive behavior and performative superiority. So, yeah, I've presented plenty of arguments; that you're defending your own arguments poorly, that you're woefully unfamiliar with the scientific method leading you to make very basic mistakes, that they teach the scientific method in first grade (on reflection maybe they just don't do that where you're at, that would explain a whole lot) etc. etc.
I have also provided quite clear reasons for why I feel my criticisms of your behavior were and are justified.
You, meanwhile, have not.
What you have done is call my arguments "bullshit", told me to "Fuck. Off.", presented claims I haven't made as justification for that behavior, tried to imply the arguments I wasn't making were so bad I was "embarassing myself", told me to learn how language works and called my quite consistent positions in this whole dumpster fire "constantly twisting increasingly more insane takes".
Part II
... Actually about the idea I've been inconsistent with my claims: if I had to guess this is based off a misunderstanding of my comments?
If you misunderstood my criticism as an assertion that 'the hypothesis is unsupported by the conclusion' (which appears to have been your argument) (it seems not unreasonable to guess that was your reading given your further responses), that does explain how you could arrive at such a heated confrontation since that would be clearly unreasonable behavior on my part. I rather explicitly have never made that claim, however. Heck, at the very start I quoted the conclusion, wherein they restate the claims in the hypothesis.
I suspect that's where the hostility comes from (assuming your claim that you really would have engaged in good faith is true) and in the face of such seemingly unwarranted hostility I haven't cared enough to reflect on your deeper motivations. Perhaps if I had done that we could have been spared this exchange, but indulging in the dialectic equivalent of playing whack-a-mole with a sledgehammer was a great deal more fun for me, no regrets.
Part III
I'm also restating my core argument for the third time: that the conclusion "This implies that the participants would not have felt disgust or anger had their avatar been male [...]" is a baseless claim. I'm not doing that because you haven't addressed it, it's just to highlight that yes from the very beginning I've made an argument, one which you directly address in your comment:
I will freely admit I'm... slightly unsure what you're claiming here, so please correct me if this is incorrect:
To me it reads like you're saying a control condition is important which yes, this is obviously important: This article on a fire retardant is a great example! However their control condition is to compare the effectiveness of their material with water - which while it obviously satisfies your condition of comparing to a chemical that does not use the same mechanism to prevent combustion (for the sake of simplicity I'm gonna just gloss over water's primary role in the fire tetrahedron as an energy sink, it's not a smothering agent) the primary reason it is included is to demonstrate that it's not simply the largest component of their material contributing the fire suppressive ability, instead of serving to present that their additives have a measureable effect.
That's what's done in the initial paper: their control condition very much exists, but it exists to show that there's a measurable difference between their experimental condition (catcalling) and a nearly identical situation but where the experimental condition (catcalling) has been removed. There's no need to compare it to other conditions because that simply isn't relevant; what could comparing it to an even less similar scenario do to explain their results? The same is true of comparing it to other forms of media; why would they want to waste time doing that? It adds nothing to their claim, and detracts nothing through it's absence. Their claims are not made in comparison to anything except their control condition. That's how control conditions work.
Your misunderstanding, that their claim is "this can be used to fix things by itself" is not their claim - they suggest that their results indicate that it may be useful in a clinical setting as a tool to contribute to those end goals, but they explicitly do not make the claim that it can be used to achieve those results, only that it may (within a clinical setting) be useful in achieving those results (a nuanced claim which they go to exhaustive lengths to demonstrate in their paper).