Stanford’s Virtual Reality Lab Cultivates Empathy for the Homeless

Because of VR’s immersive properties, some people describe the medium as “the ultimate empathy machine.” But can it make people care about something as fraught and multi-faceted as homelessness?

A study in progress at Stanford’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab explores that question.

Jamil Zaki, an assistant professor of psychology at Stanford’s Social Neuroscience Lab, helped the VR team design its study, and he says we often go out of our way to avoid feeling empathy.