Expert Perspectives — Technology for Altruism and Inspiration
Virtual Altruism

Fig. 1: Jeremy Bailenson, Stanford University
Figure 11.2
Jeremy Bailenson, Stanford University

Imagine looking in the mirror and watching yourself transform to a different race or gender. At Stanford’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab, my team and I have spent the past decade researching how virtual reality can create a feeling of empathy by allowing users to “walk a mile” in someone else’s shoes and by using technology as a tool to reduce prejudice and increase altruism.

For example, Silicon Valley corporations are working with us to develop diversity-training software—instead of simply imagining a scenario related to racial discrimination or sexual harassment, learners can experience these scenarios directly, receiving a visceral sense of the consequences of those behaviors. This technology can also be used to help people understand others in differing demographic populations. If in virtual reality you wear an avatar with a disability, our research has demonstrated that after the experience you are more willing to assist others with a disability, as compared to experimental participants in control conditions. Taking it up a notch, what if you could walk a mile in the shoes of someone who doesn’t wear shoes—a chicken, an owl, or an octopus?! The lab’s recent work has extended the notion of virtual empathy and altruism into the realm of environmental issues. When people are embodied in the avatar of a cow and then virtually prodded toward the slaughterhouse, will they continue to consume meat at every meal? If you’re embodied as a fish in a coral reef and watch your home disintegrate due to pollution and ocean acidification, might this change your views toward product consumption that is harmful to the ocean? Virtual experiences feel real, and they allow for a user to experience the impossible.

Expert Perspectives — Technology for Altruism and Inspiration
Virtual Altruism

Fig. 1: Jeremy Bailenson, Stanford University
Figure 11.2
Jeremy Bailenson, Stanford University

Imagine looking in the mirror and watching yourself transform to a different race or gender. At Stanford’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab, my team and I have spent the past decade researching how virtual reality can create a feeling of empathy by allowing users to “walk a mile” in someone else’s shoes and by using technology as a tool to reduce prejudice and increase altruism.

For example, Silicon Valley corporations are working with us to develop diversity-training software—instead of simply imagining a scenario related to racial discrimination or sexual harassment, learners can experience these scenarios directly, receiving a visceral sense of the consequences of those behaviors. This technology can also be used to help people understand others in differing demographic populations. If in virtual reality you wear an avatar with a disability, our research has demonstrated that after the experience you are more willing to assist others with a disability, as compared to experimental participants in control conditions. Taking it up a notch, what if you could walk a mile in the shoes of someone who doesn’t wear shoes—a chicken, an owl, or an octopus?! The lab’s recent work has extended the notion of virtual empathy and altruism into the realm of environmental issues. When people are embodied in the avatar of a cow and then virtually prodded toward the slaughterhouse, will they continue to consume meat at every meal? If you’re embodied as a fish in a coral reef and watch your home disintegrate due to pollution and ocean acidification, might this change your views toward product consumption that is harmful to the ocean? Virtual experiences feel real, and they allow for a user to experience the impossible.

Developing Computer Interfaces That Inspire: Insights from Affective Neuroscience

Fig. 1: Mary-Helen Immordino-Yang
Figure 11.3
Mary-Helen Immordino-Yang, Rossier School of Education, Brain and Creativity Institute, University of Southern California

Witnessing the exceptional achievements of others often leads to a subjective feeling of inspiration—a conscious desire to accomplish greater things oneself. Research suggests that inspiration varies depending on whether the action admired is remarkable for its moral implications (e.g., Martin Luther King Jr.’s activism) or for its skillfulness (e.g., Magic Johnson’s basketball playing). According to our ongoing research at the University of Southern California, whereas reactions to skillfulness are relatively direct and cognitively concrete, reactions to virtuous acts often require more abstract cognitive processing, like the calling up of personal values and memories. Reactions to virtue also tend to be more generalized than reactions to skill. For instance, whereas one who admires Magic Johnson’s playing may try harder during basketball practice, someone who admires Martin Luther King Jr. may apply her motivation more broadly—vowing to work harder toward accomplishing a goal relevant to her own personal beliefs and values, such as becoming the first in her family to graduate from college.

Our research suggests that morally and socially complex varieties of inspiration may involve distancing oneself from the current context in order to build connections to past experiences, personal values, and possible futures. This virtue-related inspiration might be particularly useful, if potentially more difficult, to promote through positive computing. How might neurobiological insights help with this aim? In an ongoing series of studies, my team and I are exposing adolescents and young adults to emotion-provoking true stories, some of which are intended to be inspirational. Participants discuss the stories in a two-hour interview and then undergo fMRI scanning with psychophysiological recording as they review the stories and report their emotion to each in real time.

These experiments reveal systematic connections between how people describe feelings of inspiration, their behaviors during these feelings, and neurobiological correlates. For example, just before participants report feeling inspired in the interview, they tend to avert their gaze away from distractions in the immediate environment, turning their eyes to a blank wall and incorporating long pauses into their speech. Increased gaze aversion correlates with increased reports of feeling inspired and with increased cognitive complexity and mentions of values. Eye-gaze aversion also correlates with individual differences in neural activity in a region known to be involved in controlling eye saccades and visual attention in monkeys as well as in personal memory processing in humans. These findings suggest that eye gaze may be a behavioral indicator of patterns important to inspiration.

Another recent analysis suggests that both personal memory retrieval and visceral feeling mechanisms are active during reflective pauses, giving new insights into why reflective pauses may be important for emotional and social meaning making during learning. Although this research is in no way ready for direct introduction into computer software, it does provide a tantalizing suggestion that neuroscientific evidence could potentially be used to identify instances of effortful internal reflection during HCI, distinguishing reflection from daydreaming or loss of attention.

It might eventually be possible for computer interfaces to use real-time readings of human eye-gaze patterns to adjust their responses in ways that would facilitate reflection on the digitally mediated experience. This innovation could potentially support learners and other users in building more complex conceptual understandings and in becoming more emotionally engaged with and possibly even inspired by what they are learning.

Developing Computer Interfaces That Inspire: Insights from Affective Neuroscience

Fig. 1: Mary-Helen Immordino-Yang
Figure 11.3
Mary-Helen Immordino-Yang, Rossier School of Education, Brain and Creativity Institute, University of Southern California

Witnessing the exceptional achievements of others often leads to a subjective feeling of inspiration—a conscious desire to accomplish greater things oneself. Research suggests that inspiration varies depending on whether the action admired is remarkable for its moral implications (e.g., Martin Luther King Jr.’s activism) or for its skillfulness (e.g., Magic Johnson’s basketball playing). According to our ongoing research at the University of Southern California, whereas reactions to skillfulness are relatively direct and cognitively concrete, reactions to virtuous acts often require more abstract cognitive processing, like the calling up of personal values and memories. Reactions to virtue also tend to be more generalized than reactions to skill. For instance, whereas one who admires Magic Johnson’s playing may try harder during basketball practice, someone who admires Martin Luther King Jr. may apply her motivation more broadly—vowing to work harder toward accomplishing a goal relevant to her own personal beliefs and values, such as becoming the first in her family to graduate from college.

Our research suggests that morally and socially complex varieties of inspiration may involve distancing oneself from the current context in order to build connections to past experiences, personal values, and possible futures. This virtue-related inspiration might be particularly useful, if potentially more difficult, to promote through positive computing. How might neurobiological insights help with this aim? In an ongoing series of studies, my team and I are exposing adolescents and young adults to emotion-provoking true stories, some of which are intended to be inspirational. Participants discuss the stories in a two-hour interview and then undergo fMRI scanning with psychophysiological recording as they review the stories and report their emotion to each in real time.

These experiments reveal systematic connections between how people describe feelings of inspiration, their behaviors during these feelings, and neurobiological correlates. For example, just before participants report feeling inspired in the interview, they tend to avert their gaze away from distractions in the immediate environment, turning their eyes to a blank wall and incorporating long pauses into their speech. Increased gaze aversion correlates with increased reports of feeling inspired and with increased cognitive complexity and mentions of values. Eye-gaze aversion also correlates with individual differences in neural activity in a region known to be involved in controlling eye saccades and visual attention in monkeys as well as in personal memory processing in humans. These findings suggest that eye gaze may be a behavioral indicator of patterns important to inspiration.

Another recent analysis suggests that both personal memory retrieval and visceral feeling mechanisms are active during reflective pauses, giving new insights into why reflective pauses may be important for emotional and social meaning making during learning. Although this research is in no way ready for direct introduction into computer software, it does provide a tantalizing suggestion that neuroscientific evidence could potentially be used to identify instances of effortful internal reflection during HCI, distinguishing reflection from daydreaming or loss of attention.

It might eventually be possible for computer interfaces to use real-time readings of human eye-gaze patterns to adjust their responses in ways that would facilitate reflection on the digitally mediated experience. This innovation could potentially support learners and other users in building more complex conceptual understandings and in becoming more emotionally engaged with and possibly even inspired by what they are learning.