Wiesing Michael, Comadran Gemma, Slater Mel
Event Lab, Department of Clinical Psychology and Psychobiology, University of Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain.
Institute of Neurosciences of the University of Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain.
iScience. 2025 May 13;28(6):112655. doi: 10.1016/j.isci.2025.112655. eCollection 2025 Jun 20.
Virtual reality's (VR) ability to create convincing illusions of presence makes it a powerful media for therapeutic and prosocial applications. Correspondingly, it also presents ethical challenges as the line between the real and virtual blurs, the focus of our study. Forty-nine participants interacted with a virtual experimenter that invited participants to sit on a chair, with 20% doing so without checking for a real chair. The virtual experimenter had also placed a tablet in a drawer, and a week later, in the corresponding real room, 45% of participants expected a tablet to be in the same place. Additionally, implicit attitudes were influenced based on subtle differences in wording of interview questions asked by the virtual experimenter. A Bayesian analysis supported these findings. Hence, participants may take virtual objects as real, risking their safety, or may inappropriately apply observations in VR to real-life problem solving, resulting in vulnerability to deception.
虚拟现实（VR）创造逼真临场幻觉的能力使其成为治疗和公益应用的强大媒介。相应地，随着现实与虚拟之间的界限变得模糊，它也带来了伦理挑战，这是我们研究的重点。49名参与者与一名虚拟实验者进行互动，该实验者邀请参与者坐在一把椅子上，20%的参与者在未检查是否有真实椅子的情况下就坐了上去。虚拟实验者还在一个抽屉里放了一台平板电脑，一周后，在相应的真实房间里，45%的参与者预期平板电脑会在同一个地方。此外，虚拟实验者所提面试问题措辞上的细微差别会影响参与者的隐性态度。贝叶斯分析支持了这些发现。因此，参与者可能会将虚拟物体视为真实物体，从而危及自身安全，或者可能会不适当地将虚拟现实中的观察结果应用于现实生活中的问题解决，从而容易受到欺骗。
