Virtual Reality Holds Promise in Combatting ‘Stereotype Threat’ – Davidson News

Switching Identities

Social psychological researchers have long known that de-emphasizing a stereotyped identity can help protect people from stereotype threat, but what about switching identities altogether?

More than a decade ago researchers at Stanford identified the Proteus effect, named after the Greek god who could transform into animals or even water. The research demonstrated that a virtual reality user behaves differently in that environment based on their avatar.

The user knows that other people in the virtual environment ascribe certain characteristics to the users avatar, and the users behavior is affected by those perceptions, or stereotypes.

Pecks and Goods results, published in 2018 in a special edition of IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics with follow-on work published in 2020 in the proceedings of the ACM Computer-Human Interactions Conference, first affirmed that the harmful effect of stereotype threat could be found in a virtual environment.

They showed that womens performance on a visuospatial test suffered when they were placed in a female avatar and told that men and women score differently on the test, compared to when women in female avatars were told there were no gender differences in test scores.

However, when the women were placed in a male avatar and reminded of a gender difference, their performance did not suffer.

It wasnt just women participants who were affected.

Everybody who was in a female avatar under stereotype threat, Good said, had lower math confidence than if they were not under threat.

That means that men who were put in female avatars showed poorer performance on the visuospatial test when they were told there were gender differences on the test. In other words, just like the Proteus effect, when men were put in female avatars, they took on behaviors consistent with stereotypes of women.

Ultimately, the gendered avatar switch worked. It was capable of buffering against stereotypes, but people cant walk around in VR headsets all the time.

Peck and Good argue that there are promising and realistic future implications of their work. For example, they are interested in understanding whether VR technology can be utilized in real classroom settings (both in person and remote classrooms) to address real experiences of stereotype threat.

The pandemic has expanded the use of virtual tools, including virtual environments and virtual identities. We have all played around with changing our virtual background in Zoom, and lots of virtual educational institutions use avatars as stand-ins for live teachers. Our familiarity with virtual tools, developed out of a tragic global necessity, has paved the way for use of the kinds of technology that Peck and Good are researching.

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Virtual Reality Holds Promise in Combatting 'Stereotype Threat' - Davidson News