The purpose of this proposal is to test if the virtual reality through embodiments conditions may reduce implicit and explicit prejudice towards migrants, and which conditions may moderate this effect. We plan to conduct two studies in which the participants will be brought into embodying a migrant in a virtual reality (VR) environment. Study 1 will be divided into two phases. In the first phase, the participants (N = 500) will respond to a questionnaire, whereas in the second phase a reduced number of participants will take part of a virtual reality setting. This experimental study will investigate whether the manipulation of behaviour of an out-group member (positive vs. neutral) may decrease racial prejudice and infrahumanisation effect. In Study 2 the VR experience will reproduce the scenario in which a refugee (coming from a Middle-East country) is interrogated by an immigration officer regarding his/her background. The participants are going to embody a refugee avatar, trying to convince the Officer to approve their asylum applications. Here, the perspective-taking strategy will be based on exploiting the humanitarian side of participants, as they could be put through what refugees experience when they first arrive to Italy.
Through this project we will extend the research field by producing theoretical advances in the innovative field which combines virtual reality technologies and intergroup contact in reducing prejudice. Very little psychological research has been done on inter-group relations and prejudice through virtual reality as an instrument for contact. Furthermore, the introduction of VR technology as a platform for experimental interventions will bring a new methodological approach to both the contact literature and communication research, as it will establish the base to the analyse contact in similar platforms such as videogames, and augmented and mixed reality.
VR represents an innovative step in the overall landscape of intergroup encounters because it differs from any other type of indirect contact intervention, but adopts many of the social, psychological, and communicative processes that come into play in traditional face-to-face contact. In fact, VR-based contact would be inserted in the last stages of what Crisp and Prof Turner (2009) termed as a continuum of contact, which organises contact strategies in a gradient going from distal (imagined, extended) to more proximal forms of contact (cross-group friendship, computer-mediated), with face-to-face being the ultimate and most direct stage. Therefore, this project¿s will provide a better understanding of the underlying mechanisms involved in the results with regard to the role of avatar customisation. Second, it will give an opportunity to test the effect of humanisation strategy on reducing infrahumanisation tendency.
Another innovation the current project will develop is the proposed triangulation between quantitative and qualitative techniques designed to complement and/or reinforce the effects attained to the VR-contact. Most studies in the contact literature use either a deductive or an inductive approach separately.