Virtual reality can place people inside the lived experience of bias rather than asking them to imagine it.

Some virtual experiences meant to dissolve prejudice can backfire, reinforcing the biases they aim to reduce.

Understanding when and for whom virtual experiences may backfire is essential for responsible VR research.

You look down, and something feels wrong. The hands in front of you are not the ones you are used to, and when you catch your reflection, it is a different face that meets your gaze—one capable of changing how others respond to you.

People look at you differently, speak to you differently, and react to the same words and gestures in ways that feel unfamiliar, as if the rules of the interaction have changed without anyone explaining why.

Nothing else in the environment has changed, and yet your experience of it has. What has changed is who you are within it, or at least who others believe you to be.

Except you’re not there, but wearing a headset.

Over the past decades, psychologists have begun using virtual reality (VR) to investigate one of the most persistent features of human life: how we relate to people who belong to groups different from our own. From racial prejudice to political polarization, intergroup tensions shape societies across the world. Now researchers are asking whether immersive technology might help us understand and improve those relationships.

The answer, it turns out, is complicated.

A Laboratory for Social Encounters

For decades, scientists studying prejudice relied on surveys, laboratory experiments, or real-world interventions such as intergroup contact programs. These approaches yielded important insights but often faced practical limits. It is not easy, for example, to recreate a tense encounter between groups under controlled conditions.

In our recent critical review, we examined how virtual reality is beginning to change this landscape. In VR, researchers can construct detailed social worlds where participants can encounter virtual characters representing members of different groups or experience situations from someone else’s perspective. In some studies, people even inhabit a virtual body representing a person who belongs to a different social group—what we call outgroup embodiment.

These experiences feel surprisingly real. VR works by creating a strong sense of presence, the feeling of “being there” inside the simulated environment. When that illusion succeeds, our brains respond to the digital world almost as if it were physical reality.

That realism makes VR a powerful experimental tool. Researchers can manipulate social interactions, observe behavior in real time, explore how people respond to complex intergroup situations, and more.

One of the most striking uses of VR is immersive perspective-taking.

In classic psychological experiments, perspective-taking involves imagining what life might feel like for someone else. In VR, that imagination becomes a sensory experience.

In some experiments, participants see the world through the eyes of someone from a different group—for instance, a victim of discrimination. Others go further, synchronizing a virtual body with the participant’s movements so that the digital body begins to feel like their own.

These experiences can change how people feel about others. Studies have shown that embodying an outgroup member or observing events from their viewpoint can increase empathy, reduce certain biases, and encourage more prosocial behavior.

But the effects are not universal, as some interventions produce meaningful changes, while others show little impact or even unexpected backlash.

When Virtual Experiences Backfire

Under certain conditions, VR interventions can produce the opposite of what researchers intend. If a scenario feels threatening or uncomfortable, participants may psychologically distance themselves from the experience. In some experiments, embodying a stigmatized group member actually increased bias when the situation activated negative stereotypes.

Pre-existing beliefs may also come into play: People strongly committed to particular political or ideological positions may interpret immersive experiences through the lens of motivated reasoning, reinforcing their original attitudes rather than reconsidering them.

Even the design of the virtual world plays a role. Passive experiences, such as watching a narrative unfold without interacting, sometimes fail to trigger the kinds of meaningful engagement that drive real-world attitude change.

Despite these uncertainties, research on immersive technologies and intergroup relations is expanding rapidly. The number of scientific papers on the topic has grown dramatically in the past decade, reflecting both advances in technology and growing interest across disciplines. VR is now being tested in a wide range of contexts: diversity training, education, policing, healthcare, and conflict resolution.

The appeal is obvious: Immersive technologies allow researchers to simulate social situations that would be impossible to recreate in real life.

A New Window Into Human Relations

The dream that virtual reality could dissolve prejudice overnight may have been naive, but the technology is offering something of equal worth: a new way to observe the mechanics of social life. Inside a headset, researchers can watch how identities shift and how people react when confronted with unfamiliar perspectives.

If used carefully, immersive technologies may not magically erase the boundaries between “us” and “them,” but they might help us understand those boundaries better, and perhaps even learn how to cross them.

Tassinari, M., Marinucci, M., & Hasler, B. S. (2026). Immersive Technologies and Intergroup Relations: A Critical Review of Theoretical Questions and Methodological Challenges. Computers in Human Behavior, 108908. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2026.108908

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