Virtual Reality as a Medium for Attitude Change

Abstract

The study of attitude change has been of interest for decades, with social professionals, having to deal with real actors, written words, and relying on traditional software and hardware to achieve their goals. Virtual Reality (VR), due to its immersive, transformative and engaging form, and its ability to make users feel like they are part of the virtual world that surrounds them, can be a useful medium to affect peoples’ attitudes, including emotions, behavior, knowledge, and beliefs over an entity. This dissertation, through a series of three experimental studies, delves into whether VR can be used as a medium for attitude change, in order to modernize the existing traditional methods used by social professionals. Attitudes can be categorized into affective, behavioural and cognitive attitudes. They include our emotions, behavior, and knowledge about an entity. In this dissertation, focus is given to changing affective attitudes and more specifically empathy toward stigmatized groups and cognitive attitudes and more specifically increasing knowledge about an archeological site in Cyprus. Thus, the first study, offered the ability to participants, to experience through VR, a substance use situation in a virtual school from different perspectives (a teacher and two different students, one of them experiencing hallucinations due to drug use), to change affective attitudes and more specifically, induce empathy about drug users. The VR intervention elicited a statistically significant difference in participants ability, those who viewed the scenario through the drug users’ perspective, the ability to relate to students going through drug problems. An increase in participants’ heart rate after the experiment, compared to their heart rate before the experiment, indicates that they experienced a stressful condition as there was a significant difference in their reported negative mood states as well. The second study explored VR’s ability to support sensorimotor contingencies, on changing affective attitudes and more specifically inducing empathy toward drug users. It was a comparison between a VR and a non-VR system that was not offering any sensorimotor contingencies. Results showed a significant positive correlation between the closeness to the drug user and empathy in the VR group and that both conditions achieved an increase in positive attitudes. The third study dealt with cognitive attitudes and more specifically increasing knowledge about a part of Cyprus’ cultural heritage and more specifically an archaeological site. It was investigated whether participants’ attitudes and knowledge toward archaeology can be affected by using an immersive VR and a Desktop Application, taking users on a virtual tour of an archaeological site in Cyprus. There was not a significant change in attitudes toward archaeology between the two groups. Interestingly, the VR Application was found to be less effective in acquiring and memorizing new information about the archaeological site. Results from these studies show the potential of VR as a medium for attitude change and more specifically for affective attitudes and more specifically inducing empathy for drug users and positive attitudes for them. VR-based methods did not significantly increase knowledge or a change in attitudes towards an archaeological site. Findings showed that more research is needed regarding what could make VR-based methods more effective for bringing cognitive attitude change like knowledge acquisition, with promising results in inducing empathy for stigmatized groups.