Microblog Memes

I would look at the study, while the problem is 100% real and anyone with any empathy should realize is real, to say the study supports it is a bit far fetched. Looking at the scenarios they created and the avatars, it's all a bit uncanny valley and backrooms sort of feeling. Sort of ps2 graphics but in vr.

E: I think the conclusion puts it best, vr is a good tool for showing people what a lot of women have to deal with, and how terrible it can feel. It's like rp for people who have trouble empathizing or don't get why it matters.

I'd also be worried about the reaction being tainted by the target not being your desire. Like, I'd imagine a straight dude will be more uncomfortable being catcalled by a dude than a lady (regardless of whether their avatar is a woman or not). Obviously the study is a bit more robust than that, but it's still an inherent issue hard to circumvent just with VR.

Your point?

Right, but as a 6’-5” dude I feel a lot less anxiety. When I feel any anxiety I can ignore it and remind myself that the shit I’m conjuring up just doesn’t actually happen here. Meanwhile, my friend has been followed home multiple times and all she did was be vaguely kind to a man. One time she didn’t even ever talk to the dude, he just saw her at the bar and decided that was his night to be a gargantuan piece of filth!

No one is actually going to mug me here but I know many people who constantly need to be on edge around men, even people who are supposed to be their friends. It’s not about feeling anxious, it’s about understanding that women experience all the same anxieties and also have to deal with a bunch of other, far more real, threats all the while being often physically smaller/weaker.

You’re not wrong that both genders experience anxiety but you have just entirely missed the point. When the women in your life deal with this shit I hope you approach the situation with more compassion than whatever drove you to writing that stupid comment.

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On another note, carrying a weapon actually makes you more anxious. You’d think it would give a feeling of safety but it really doesn’t, so you best be damn sure you have a real good reason to be packing heat.

While my first reaction was the same - "how would they react in male avatars?", that doesn't seem to be the point at all of this study but rather the potential of VR to change the subjects behaviour in real life by helping empathy along.

Introduction
[...]
Peck et al.13 found that White participants, after embodying a Black avatar, showed a reduction in implicit racial bias.
This principle has been extended to the context of gender-based violence.
Seinfeld et al.14 had male offenders embody a female victim of domestic violence, finding that the VR experience significantly improved their ability to recognize fear in female facial expressions—a deficit common in violent offenders15.
Similarly, other studies using 360° videos and immersive scenarios of sexual harassment have reported marked increases in empathy and changes in violent attitudes among participants16.
[...]
These findings collectively affirm the potential of VR as a rehabilitative tool for enhancing emotional understanding and mitigating harmful behaviors.

Building on this foundation, the present study utilizes immersive VR to provide male participants with a firsthand experience of catcalling.
While previous research has often focused on overt violence, our goal is to investigate the affective response to a more commonplace form of street harassment. We hypothesize that this embodied experience will elicit morally salient emotions like disgust and anger19,20,21.
By inducing this moral discomfort, the intervention aims to foster self-awareness and encourage a reconsideration of the behavior’s impact22, serving as a potential strategy to promote behavioral change.

• https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-025-19418-4

Black Like Me was eye opening for a lot of people. Even John Howard Griffin, who did blackface to understand the black southern experience, and already fought for civil rights, was surprised by how he was treated.

If I remember it right, at the beginning of his journey he had to beg and find help because he was refused service when trying to cash his travellers checks.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-025-19418-4.pdf

Paper itself above. Need a deeper reading with my notes but on the surface the stats are so-so. They check normality, but don't confirm linearity (use of pmcc will not be valid without - there are also a few other conditions to check for hypothesis testing with PMCC if memory serves), use of a continuous test (PMCC, ANOVA, unpaired t's) for discrete (likert) data is also little controversial, but generally condoned.

As for the conclusion, not a psych phd so I'll assume they know their stuff!

Yeah, but the point here is that they were posing as women with female looking avatars. One guy even says that he would have reacted differently if it was male:

Another participant reported that he would have reacted differently had he been in the role of a man, but since he was embodying a female character, he chose instead to walk away.