Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Branham, Lindsay

Titel

Virtual Immersive Contact: A Field Experiment to Reduce Prejudice and Discrimination in Central African Republic

Ist Teil von

• The Journal of conflict resolution, 2024-04, Vol.68 (4), p.786-819

Ort / Verlag

Los Angeles, CA: SAGE Publications

Erscheinungsjahr

2024

Link zum Volltext

Quelle

Worldwide Political Science Abstracts

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• This present research explores a progressive repurposing of Virtual Reality technology, Virtual Immersive Contact (VIC), in a real-world setting to; explore viability to reduce prejudice and investigate the role of empathy in motivating prosocial behavior. The study employed a between-subjects repeated-measures experimental design of a randomized sample (n = 113) split into two conditions to reduce prejudice and discrimination in the active conflict area of the Central African Republic (CAR). In line with the study’s hypotheses, VIC produced a significant increase in empathic concern for the Muslim outgroup and intentions to donate to a Muslim family, while also showing that the relationship between empathy and helping behaviours was mostly explained by confounding variables. This research provides both the first evidence of its kind that VIC could be a new form of fostering positive intergroup contact in an active conflict setting, crating a new facet of intergroup contact theory, and further evolving the literature on the empathy, prosocial behaviour relationship.