Virtual Reality Not for “Being Someone” but for “Being in Someone Else’s Shoes”: Avoiding Misconceptions in Empathy Enhancement
Metadata
Show full item recordEditorial
Frontiers Research Foundation
Materia
Empathy Empathy enhancement Moral enhancement Sympathy Virtual reality ethics
Date
2021-08-24Referencia bibliográfica
Lara F and Rueda J (2021) Virtual Reality Not for “Being Someone” but for “Being in Someone Else’s Shoes”: Avoiding Misconceptions in Empathy Enhancement. Front. Psychol. 12:741516. doi: [10.3389/fpsyg.2021.741516]
Sponsorship
State Research Agency of the Spanish Government PID2019-104943RB-I00; La Caixa Foundation LCF/BQ/DR20/11790005Abstract
In this article, we show that Ramirez et al.’s ethical rejection of empathy enhancement through
VR is based on confusion. First, we show that this misunderstanding stems from the conception
of empathy-enhancing simulations solely as failed attempts at “being someone else,” along with
ignoring the crucial difference between the psychological perspective-taking processes of imagineother
and imagine-self. Then, having overcome that misconception, we argue that the ethical
misgivings about the use of VR to promote empathy should disappear and that these projects have
greater potential for behavioural change than purely sympathy-focused interventions.