Could Virtual Reality-Based eLearning Transform Employee Behavior and Attitudes?

A virtual reality eLearning experience has the potential todo far more than engage learners: By immersing learners in an experience,virtual reality, or VR, can literally change the way they see a situation. Withthe potential to transform learners’ perceptions, VR could utterly transformthe way some types of training are conducted.

The Virtual Human Interaction Lab (VHIL) at Stanford University is exploring just how VRaffects people’s attitudes and behavior—and for how long after theexperience those changes stick. This has implications for many kinds ofeLearning, ranging from skills drills to exercises that combat bias, raiseawareness of harassing or marginalizing behavior, and promote diversity.

How VR works

A virtual world can be created using 360-degree video; thisallows learners to examine a digital environment that looks exactly like a realplace. The virtual world can also be completely computer-generated; the moredetailed and the more lifelike the environment, the costlier it is to create.

However, once a digital environment is created, thatenvironment can be used for many different VR experiences. And according toTobin Asher, lab manager at the VHIL, the environment and avatars do not haveto be completely realistic to have the immersive effect. An advantage of usingcomputer-generated virtual worlds is that learners—or, rather, theiravatars—can move around and interact with those worlds, and with items andother avatars in them. When viewing a “virtual world” in 360-degree video, thelearner can observe but not interact, Asher said.

VR headsets are getting smaller and lighter with each newiteration of technology, but the age of unencumbered VR is not yet here. Toimmerse themselves in the VR experience, learners have to wear the gear. Butthe difference between an interactive experience and an immersive experience isclear the moment a learner dons the VR headset. Upon entering the virtualworld, learners will find that barriers, including gravity, vanish; anything ispossible.

When done well, inhabiting a virtual world creates“presence,” a feeling of existing within that environment. In the virtualworld, the learner becomes an avatar. An avatar is a digital representation ofthe person; it can take any shape. The avatar moves in response to the person’smovement. As technological advances improve the tracking and rendering of aperson within the virtual environment—tracking traces the person’s movements inthe real world, and rendering moves the avatar within the virtual world toreflect those movements—the feeling of presence grows stronger. According toAsher, it takes about four minutes of inhabiting an avatar and interacting inthe virtual world before the brain makes a switch—and the learner actuallybelieves that she is the avatar.

While inhabiting the virtual world, a learner’s avatar caninteract with other avatars and agents in that environment, making teamtraining feasible. An agent is an avatar that is controlled by a computerrather than being responsive to a person’s actions.

Perspective taking, embodiment, and eLearning

Researchers at the VHIL and elsewhere are finding thatimmersive experiences have a far more powerful—and lasting—impact on attitudesand behavior than other media experiences, whether those involve reading text,watching ordinary video, or taking part in interactive exercises orsimulations. VHIL researchers are examining whether VR can enhance soft skills,such as empathy, or influence or change behavior, such as planning for thefuture or helping others.

VHIL studies have examined a variety of situations, including:scenarios that could engender empathy for older people or people withdisabilities, participants’ willingness to help another person, and the effectof “experiencing” racial or sexual harassment. The evidence is mounting thatimmersive experiences do feel real; thus the lab’s studies have implicationsfor the future of eLearning, whether honing physical skills or enhancing softskills.

NFL coaches, college athletic teams, and others useimmersive VR experiences to drill skills and build muscle memory. The US Army’s Dismounted Soldier Training System allows troops to train on anytype of battlefield or scenario; groups of soldiers can train together toprepare for battle. VR simulations can replace training for events that areimpossible to re-create, and it can reduce the need for training exercises thatare expensive, dangerous, or both. Repetitive practice of physical skills, suchas football plays, improves response time and performance; doing these drillsin VR reduces the costs and injury risks associated with more frequent actualpractice.

But the potential goes far beyond building better athletesand soldiers. The NFL is also using VR to work on diversity training within theorganization, though no results are yet available. Other possibilities forenhancing “soft skills” using VR applications include:

• Embodying another. To work on empathy or participatein harassment training, learners could experience sexual harassment orprejudice by “becoming” members of another race, sex, or both. A learner’savatar can then experience harassing comments and behaviors. Because of theimmersive quality of the experience, the learner’s brain believes that theexperience is real; the learner feels as if he or she actually experienced thistreatment.
• Perspective taking. Learners whoparticipated in immersive experiences where they felt what it would be like tobe colorblind, homeless, or elderly showed greater willingness, following theexperience, to assist people who actually were colorblind, homeless, orelderly. Researchers compared VR participants’ behavior with that ofparticipants in more conventional perspective-taking studies, where they wereasked to imagine having the condition or read descriptions of individuals’lives under those conditions. An immersive experience of schizophrenia,including visual and auditory hallucinations, was more successful in influencingparticipants’ attitudes toward individuals with schizophrenia than thinkingabout and imagining what schizophrenia would be like.
• Public speaking practice. Employees’avatars can practice public speaking in front of a room full of avatars. If anemployee is especially phobic, the initial avatars can be very non-lifelike;they can also be distracted, looking at virtual phones, for example, and notmaking eye contact with the speaker. As the learner practices and becomes moreconfident, the avatars could look and behave more like actual human listeners,the size of the audience can increase, and the audience can even interact withthe speaker. 
• Reflexive empathy. Immersive experiencescan even influence learners’ behavior on their own behalf. Participants whoseavatars “became” older versions of themselves made better decisions aboutsaving for retirement and other long-term planning than participants who merelythought about their future selves.

Possible side effects

The effects on learners’ behavior are not always positive. A2009 study found that embodiment in a different-race avatar could activatestereotypes and in fact “encourages stereotype activation to the point that itoverwhelms any positive effects of perspective taking.” On the other hand, a 2013 study by Tabitha Peck, et al, where participants spent more time in theembodied condition, found that “embodiment of light-skinned individuals in adark-skinned virtual body at least temporarily reduces their implicit biasagainst people who are coded as out-group on the basis of the color of theskin.” 

Researchers Susan Persky and Jim Blascovich found thatplaying violent video games in an immersive VR environment translates to moreviolent attitudes and behavior than playing similarly violent games in a moreconventional, non-immersive environment (see References). Strong “presence” appearsto mean a stronger identification with the avatar and his or her actions. Thebenefits of this identification in sports practice or military training areobvious; the trainees become more proficient at their tasks. But the potentialnegative effects of identification with a violent or aggressive avatar thatcould occur from repeated immersion in a violent game are troubling. Persky andBlascovich also found that participants in the immersive game exhibited acardiovascular response similar to that of a person under threat—that is, theirphysiological reaction was as if they were actually under threat, an effect notseen in players of a conventional computer game.

False memories

A defining feature of immersive experiences is that theytrick participants’ brains into believing that the experiences are real. Thisis both a strength and a potential weakness. The “realness” is what caninfluence participants’ behavior changes—greater empathy leads to increasedwillingness to aid others; a deeper understanding of how racism or sexualharassment feels can change explicit racism, even if it does not changeunderlying bias.

But immersive experiences might also create “falsememories.” While preschool children have been found to create false memorieswhen exposed to many varieties of prompting, such as being asked leadingquestions or being shown manipulated photos, elementary school (and older)children are less susceptible to these cues. Participating in an immersive VRexperience that depicts an avatar resembling the child, however, is more likelythan most other types of prompting to trigger false memories of havingparticipated in the activity “in the real world” in children as old as six or seven. 

VHIL researchers found that both preschool and elementary-age children werelikely to create false memories when asked to imagine having participated inthe events and when they viewed a video of a VR simulation using an avatar thatresembled the child. However, the researchers point out that imagining an eventrequires that the child apply cognitive energy to creating the images; theimmersive VR event was completely controlled by a third party.

Questions remain on long-term effectiveness

None of these studies followed up with participants overlong periods of time; the VHIL is currently conducting a 10-week longitudinalstudy to begin examining whether changes in attitude or behavior are “sticky.”The results of longer-term studies will be key determinants for organizationsweighing the investment in VR-based diversity training. If the changes arefound to be positive and long-lasting—or at least, to have more effect thancurrent training approaches—embodiment and perspective taking through VR maywell become the new standard for some soft skills and diversity training.

References

Ahn, Sun Joo (Grace), Amanda Minh Tran Le, and Jeremy Bailenson.“The Effect of Embodied Experiences on Self-Other Merging, Attitude, andHelping Behavior.” Media Psychology,Vol. 16, No. 1. February 2013.
https://vhil.stanford.edu/mm/2013/ahn-mp-embodied-experiences.pdf

Bymer, Loren. “DSTS:First immersive virtual training system fielded.” US Army. 1 August 2012.
https://www.army.mil/article/84728/DSTS__First_immersive_virtual_training_system_fielded

Felnhofer, Anna, OswaldD. Kothgassner, Nathalie Hauk, Leon Beutl, Helmut Hlavacs, and IlseKryspin-Exner. “Physical and social presence in collaborative virtual environments:Exploring age and gender differences with respect to empathy.” Computers inHuman Behavior, Vol. 31. February 2014.

Groom, Victoria, Jeremy Bailenson, and Clifford Nass. “The influenceof racial embodiment on racial bias in immersive virtual environments.” Social Influence, Vol. 4, No. 3. June 2009.
https://vhil.stanford.edu/mm/2009/groom-racial-embodiment.pdf

Peck, Tabitha C., Sofia Seinfeld, Salvatore M. Aglioti, andMel Slater. “Putting Yourself in the Skin of a Black Avatar Reduces ImplicitRacial Bias.” Consciousness and Cognition, Vol. 22, No. 3. September 2013.
https://publicationslist.org/data/melslater/ref-243/paper-revised.pdf

Persky, Susan, and Jim Blascovich. “Immersive Virtual EnvironmentsVersus Traditional Platforms: Effects of Violent and Nonviolent Video Game Play.”Media Psychology, Vol. 10, No.1. 2007.