Can virtual reality improve cisgender-transgender relations? Embodied interactions in perspective taking and intergroup contact

Embodied social interactions in immersive virtual reality (VR) have the potential to improve intergroup relations. However, minimal work has empirically addressed applications of this approach to gender diverse identities. The current study investigates the effects of VR perspective taking and VR-mediated intergroup contact on cisgender individuals’ interpersonal coordination, empathy, and affiliation with a transgender outgroup target. Australian, young adults ( N  = 126) were assigned to embody either a transgender or cisgender virtual avatar, while interacting with a transgender confederate (human-controlled virtual agent). Participant-confederate dyadic motion trajectories were tracked across two iterations of a simulated, semi-structured interview, which were separated by the explicit disclosure of the confederate’s gender identity. Using cross-recurrence quantification analysis, results suggest that all participants exhibited more spontaneous interpersonal coordination with the confederate at phase two. However, an examination of the simple effects suggested that transgender-embodied men experienced the greatest increases in interpersonal coordination. Similarly, all participants reported more empathy toward the confederate at phase two, and this mediated relationships between the sense of virtual embodiment and perceived affiliation with the confederate. However, only transgender-embodied participants reported perceived similarity with the confederate. When taken together, these observations triangulate automatic, unconscious measures of affiliation (i.e., spontaneous coordination) and conscious, self-reported measures of affiliation and empathy. By simultaneously investigating VR perspective taking and VR-mediated contact approaches to prejudice reduction, this work proposes that cisgender women and men may experience greater affiliation with a transgender outgroup target following a combined approach, compared to VR-mediated contact alone.