IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/plo/pone00/0222342.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

The enemy’s gaze: Immersive virtual environments enhance peace promoting attitudes and emotions in violent intergroup conflicts

Author

Listed:
  • Yossi Hasson
  • Noa Schori-Eyal
  • Daniel Landau
  • Béatrice S Hasler
  • Jonathan Levy
  • Doron Friedman
  • Eran Halperin

Abstract

Perspective-taking is essential for improving intergroup relations. However, it is difficult to implement, especially in violent conflicts. Given that immersive virtual reality (VR) can simulate various points of view (POV), we examined whether it can lead to beneficial outcomes by promoting outgroup perspective-taking, even in armed conflicts. In two studies, Jewish-Israelis watched a 360° VR scene depicting an Israeli-Palestinian confrontation from different POVs–outgroup’s, ingroup’s while imagining outgroup perspective or ingroup’s without imagined perspective-taking. Participants immersed in the outgroup’s POV, but not those who imagined the outgroup’s perspective, perceived the Palestinians more positively than those immersed in the ingroup’s POV. Moreover, participants in the outgroup’s POV perceived the Palestinian population in general more favorably and judged a real-life ingroup transgression more strictly than those in the ingroup’s POV, even five months after VR intervention. Results suggest that VR can promote conflict resolution by enabling effective perspective-taking.

Suggested Citation

  • Yossi Hasson & Noa Schori-Eyal & Daniel Landau & Béatrice S Hasler & Jonathan Levy & Doron Friedman & Eran Halperin, 2019. "The enemy’s gaze: Immersive virtual environments enhance peace promoting attitudes and emotions in violent intergroup conflicts," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 14(9), pages 1-14, September.
    • Handle: RePEc:plo:pone00:0222342
    DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0222342
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0222342
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0222342&type=printable
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1371/journal.pone.0222342?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:plo:pone00:0222342. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: plosone (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.