Promoting empathetic abilities of Dutch police officers through VR perspective-taking: a proof of concept

Contemporary police officers often lack a proper understanding of civilian’s mental states required to deliver an appropriate empathic response. Recently, virtual reality (VR) emerged as a promising medium to promote empathy, offering several crucial advantages over traditional methods. However, as research is limited on VR empathy training, its effectiveness and practical utility for the police remains unclear. This study investigated the effectivity and utility of two VR empathy tools for the Dutch police force. In this study, 11 Dutch police officers were immersed in two simulations of the perspectives of a child victim of domestic violence (DV) and a person living with a mild intellectual disability (MID), in counterbalanced order. Results showed that, in line with the hypotheses, for the DV simulation, participants’ illusionary feeling of presence in the virtual world predicted their emotional involvement with the experience, and in turn, this emotional involvement predicted...Show moreContemporary police officers often lack a proper understanding of civilian’s mental states required to deliver an appropriate empathic response. Recently, virtual reality (VR) emerged as a promising medium to promote empathy, offering several crucial advantages over traditional methods. However, as research is limited on VR empathy training, its effectiveness and practical utility for the police remains unclear. This study investigated the effectivity and utility of two VR empathy tools for the Dutch police force. In this study, 11 Dutch police officers were immersed in two simulations of the perspectives of a child victim of domestic violence (DV) and a person living with a mild intellectual disability (MID), in counterbalanced order. Results showed that, in line with the hypotheses, for the DV simulation, participants’ illusionary feeling of presence in the virtual world predicted their emotional involvement with the experience, and in turn, this emotional involvement predicted empathy towards victims of domestic violence. Contrary to the hypotheses, for the MID simulation, presence did not predict emotional involvement. Yet, in line with the hypotheses, emotional involvement did predict empathy towards people living with a mild intellectual disability. Combined with insights from post-simulation interviews, both VR empathy tools are concluded to be effective and useful for Dutch police empathy training. These findings highlight VR’s potential to shape scalable and standardardized training opportunities to support the complex role of contemporary policing. Future research could extend our approach by including a control group and by making a direct comparison between VR, traditional perspective-taking tasks, and roleplay empathy training.Show less

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Promoting empathetic abilities of Dutch police officers through VR perspective-taking: a proof of concept