What is it about?
Can continuous interaction with a virtual refugee through a digital game reduce people's prejudice and anxiety towards refugees or promote closeness and empathy toward refugees? Through an experiment, we found that intergroup contact with a virtual refugee promoted closeness but also increased anxiety toward refugees.
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Photo by Levi Meir Clancy on Unsplash
Why is it important?
Contact between different groups can improve intergroup relations under the right conditions, but intergroup contact can be difficult to maintain and costly. Virtual humans offer a new possibility for people to learn about other groups of people and maintain contact as a starting point for broader and deeper intergroup relations.
Perspectives
Working with news stories about refugees for the past two years has made me wonder whether there are new ways to build empathy and support for people who may seem different from us. This study is our attempt to explore using virtual refugees as a way to motivate people to build relationships and learn about refugees.
Yu-Hao Lee
University of Florida
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Intergroup contact with a virtual refugee: Reducing prejudice through a cooperative game., Psychology of Popular Media, September 2022, American Psychological Association (APA),
DOI: 10.1037/ppm0000433.
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