Empathy machines

Abstract

A major claim about virtual reality (VR) is that it can foster empathy through digital simulations. This article argues, however, that technologies intended to foster empathy merely presume to acknowledge the experience of another, but fail to do so in any meaningful way. With empathy, the experiential grounds upon which ethical and moral arguments are made require an essential transmissibility, and that which cannot be expressed in seemingly ‘universal’ terms cannot be acknowledged. This article makes its arguments through a discussion of VR as an ‘empathy machine’, and contextualizes empathy in digital media by suggesting it repeats not a psychological construct, but a concept derived from late 19th-century German aesthetic theory and its conceptualization of Einfühlung. It proposes radical compassion as an alternative to empathy, and suggests that empathy is a limiting and problematic concept that effaces another’s experience unless it can be made sensible.

“Empathy machine”: how virtual reality affects human rights attitudes

“…This specific term, and the aim of inducing empathy via VR, has often been criticized in regard to the inability of humans to truly know and feel others' experiences. According to this critique, subjects are absorbed, through consumption, and transformed into an object in an attempt to consolidate oneself and the other, ultimately understanding the other through this process (Bollmer, 2017;Fisher, 2017;Hassan, 2019). However, this seems to be a misconception, which may stem from a literal interpretation of popular discourse, as the absolute understanding of another's experiences is not the goal.…”

Empathy and nausea: virtual reality and Jordan Wolfson’s Real Violence

“…This line of thought extends to the arguments of Stanford psychologist Jeremy Bailenson (2018), the most notable academic advocate for VR as a technology that can help do away with racism, sexism, and otherwise educate from the assumption that VR allows one to feel how it means to live and exist as another. Yet, as one of the co-authors of this article has argued previously, technological simulation cannot be empathetic because, rather than allowing one to acknowledge the experience of another, it merely absorbs another’s experience into one’s own, assimilating another into one’s subjectivity as if simulation is equivalent to lived experience (Bollmer, 2017). Mark Andrejevic and Zala Volcic (2019), extending this critique, have argued that technologies for fostering empathy, rather than permitting acknowledgement of alterity, are instead completely solipsistic.…”

“…By assuming empathy as something neurological and sensory, VR has become firmly linked with an ideal of socially responsible forms of sensation, one that literally remakes and ‘corrects’ brains and perception. It relies on a politics of vision that suggests that seeing through the first-person mechanisms afforded by VR permits one to understand and act in accordance with an empathetic, cognitive knowledge that emerges from supposedly knowing what it is like to be another through the simulation of experience (Andrejevic and Volcic, 2019; Bollmer, 2017; Hassan, 2019; Nakamura, 2020). VR thus enacts what Grant Kester (2013) terms an ‘orthopedic’ aesthetic, which ‘conceives of the viewer as an inherently flawed subject whose perceptual apparatus requires correction’ (p. 88).…”

Nursing education, virtual reality and empathy?

“…what patients go through in ways that will transform them into more empathic providers (Bauman, 2012). VR-based simulations of psychopathology, for example, may indeed evoke some experience of the effects of psychopathology and thus raise awareness in the learner (Formosa et al, 2017).…”