# Changing Bodies Changes Minds-and Behavior? An Economists Guide to Embodiment Interventions

Nina Rapoport

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école d'économie d'aix-marseille
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# Changing Bodies Changes Minds-and Behavior? An Economists Guide to Embodiment Interventions

Nina Rapoport

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# Changing Bodies Changes Minds—and Behavior?
## An Economist's Guide to Embodiment Interventions*

Nina Rapoport †

### Abstract

This review examines how virtual embodiment interventions can inform economic research on inequality across social groups. These interventions, widely used in psychology and related disciplines, consist of using virtual reality to embody individuals in virtual bodies whose appearance can be experimentally manipulated. By varying key characteristics such as skin-tone, gender, or age, researchers can induce the illusion of inhabiting the body of an outgroup member. I synthesize existing research on outgroup embodiment and provide both a practical guide to designing embodiment interventions and a critical assessment of the methodological trade-offs involved in their implementation. In addition, I discuss how combining embodiment interventions with tools from experimental economics can serve two purposes: first, to advance research on social inequality by introducing new methods to study its socio-cognitive foundations; and second, to address open questions in the embodiment literature by testing whether “changing bodies” can change not only minds but also behavior.

**Keywords:** Experimental economics; Discrimination; Inequality; Prejudice; Identity; Virtual reality

**JEL Codes:** C91, D91, J16

<footnote>*I thank Philippe Bertrand and Pawel Tacikowski for generously sharing their expertise at the onset of this research agenda, Nicolas Jacquemet for encouraging me to write this review and for his guidance throughout the process, and Loukas Balafoutas and Inga Jasinskaja-Lahti for their valuable feedback. The project leading to this publication has received funding from the French government under the “France 2030” investment plan managed by the French National Research Agency (reference :ANR-17-EURE-0020) and from Excellence Initiative of Aix-Marseille University - A*MIDEX.</footnote>

<footnote>†Aix Marseille University, CNRS, AMSE, Marseille, France. nina.rapoport@univ-amu.fr.</footnote>
# 1 Introduction

What was once a metaphor—walking in someone else’s shoes—can now be simulated by leveraging extended reality technologies to create the illusion of inhabiting a different body. Known as embodiment interventions, these methods enable researchers to systematically alter key physical characteristics of virtual bodies—such as skin tone, gender, or age—and are increasingly employed across psychology, cognitive sciences, and communication. Individuals can thus embody virtual bodies representing outgroups, i.e., social groups different from their own. For example, a man might embody a female-looking body, or a light-skinned individual might embody a dark-skinned body. This paper reviews how embodiment interventions can inform economic research on inequality across social groups. For this purpose, it is structured around two potential channels through which “changing bodies” in this way may be consequential: reductions in prejudice toward outgroups on the one hand and shifts in individuals’ sense of identity on the other.

With respect to prejudice, embodiment interventions have been shown to shift attitudes toward outgroups. This work connects naturally to the “debiasing” literature in economics reviewed in Bertrand and Duflo (2016), which highlights the role of socio-cognitive processes such as perspective-taking and intergroup contact. Embodiment interventions fall within this broader category, offering a novel way to experimentally shift perceived group boundaries. For example, a growing body of studies finds that embodying a dark-skinned virtual body can reduce racial bias (Banakou et al., 2016, 2020; Hasler et al., 2017; Kishore et al., 2019; Patané et al., 2020; Peck et al., 2013; Salmanowitz, 2018; Thériault et al., 2021). However, whether such attitudinal shifts translate into less bias in workplace hiring and promotion, or reduced perpetration or tolerance of harassment in schools, remains an open question. Addressing these questions through incentivized methods—such as controlled laboratory and lab-in-the-field experiments—and through non-incentivized approaches like surveys and vignette studies offers promising directions for future research.

Furthermore, embodiment interventions provide a methodological tool to study identity and self-perception. For example, Tacikowski et al. (2020) show that men embodied in female-looking virtual bodies report greater identification with stereotypically feminine traits such as warmth and tenderness. Peck et al. (2020) further show that this kind of virtual ‘gender-swap’ can affect cognitive performance: they find that the virtual body’s gender can either activate or mitigate stereotype threat in a working memory task. A natural next step is to examine whether such effects translate into behavioral outcomes relevant to selection into fields of study, occupations, and leadership roles—key channels through which inequality across social groups persists in the labor market. However, existing evidence
remains extremely limited: Bolt et al. (2021) study the impact of embodying a virtual
body that looks like the opposite sex on preferences for social and temporal trade-offs, and
Rapoport (2026) examines its effect on willingness to compete. These findings—reviewed
in Section 4—are often unexpected, underscoring the need for further work to clarify the
mechanisms at play.

The paper is structured as follows. Section 2 outlines the key psychological theories behind embodiment interventions, providing intuition for the mechanisms through which they may shape attitudes, identity, and behavior. Section 3 provides a practical guide to designing embodiment interventions and a critical review of different methods for creating the body ownership illusion and identifying its effects. Section 4 reviews the state-of-the-art evidence, examining how embodiment interventions affect prejudice and identity across gender, race, age, and disability. Finally, Section 5 highlights broader implications, identifies gaps in the current literature, and discusses how combining embodiment interventions with tools from experimental economics can advance both fields.

2 What are the underlying psychological mechanisms?

Embodiment interventions rely on the brain's tendency to combine sensory inputs—such as vision, touch, and motion—through a process known as multisensory integration. A classic demonstration of this process is the “rubber hand illusion”. In a seminal and highly replicated experiment, Botvinick and Cohen (1998) showed that synchronized stroking of a person's hidden real hand and a visible rubber hand creates the sensation that the rubber hand is part of their body. The same mechanism enables the creation of a full body illusion using virtual reality (VR). With the real body of the user hidden from view by a VR headset, a virtual body appears where they would expect to see their own.<fnref n="1" /> Remarkably, this illusion occurs even when the virtual body differs significantly from the user's own appearance (e.g. Peck et al., 2013, 2020). Once this illusion is induced, the psychological literature identifies several mechanisms via which it may influence attitudes and behavior.

**2.1 Bodily-self and conceptual-self**

As elaborated in Section 3.1.2, embodiment interventions take many forms. The most “minimalist” ones are similar to the rubber hand illusion described in the introduction, focusing on creating an illusion of ownership over a virtual body, often without any interaction with the virtual environment. How can such a primarily physical experience shape abstract social

<footnote n="1">¹See Section 3.1.1 for details of different ways to generate an illusion of ownership of the body in VR.</footnote>
concepts? Farmer et al. (2014) argue that this can be explained by the links between two concepts in social cognition: the *bodily-self*—responsible for the sense of ownership over one's physical body—and the *conceptual-self*, which encompasses higher-order representations such as social group memberships.

Changes to the bodily self, induced by the illusion of ownership over a virtual body, are thought to cascade to the conceptual self, reshaping perceptions of group boundaries.

Specifically, creating an illusion of ownership over a virtual body representing an outgroup is hypothesized to increase perceived physical similarity between the self and the outgroup member (Farmer and Maister, 2017). This can lead individuals to extend positive self-associations to the outgroup (Maister et al., 2015). As such, this mechanism can rationalize results such as reduction in implicit bias following embodiment as an outgroup – following the increase in positive associations extended to the outgroup, as well as changes in self-perception – following the increase in identification with the outgroup.

## 2.2 Perspective-Taking

Some embodiment interventions have an important narrative dimension, focusing on creating an experience of what it *feels like* to be another. Such interventions are often conceptualized as an immersive form of *perspective-taking*, the act of adopting another person's point of view. Traditional perspective-taking interventions—such as imagining oneself in another's situation or writing about their experiences—have been shown to reduce negative social stereotyping and increase psychological closeness (Galinsky and Moskowitz, 2000). Virtual embodiment enhances this process by allowing individuals to “step into” the body of an out-group member, creating a controlled and immersive environment to adopt their perspective. This approach addresses key limitations of traditional protocols, including variability introduced by participants' imagination and the risk of activating negative stereotypes through explicit instructions. This mechanism is particularly relevant for understanding the potential of embodiment interventions to affect prejudice and discrimination, core areas of study in the perspective-taking literature.

## 2.3 Proteus Effect

Another relevant mechanism is the *Proteus Effect*, which posits that individuals adopt traits and behaviors associated with their virtual avatar's appearance (Yee and Bailenson, 2006). It is rooted in self-perception theory—which argues that individuals infer their attitudes and traits by observing their behavior in context (Bem, 1972). This mechanism is particularly relevant to embodiment interventions that have an interactive dimension, allowing users
to explore and interact with the environment while represented by their virtual body. In such interventions, the Proteus Effect can complement or reinforce the previously discussed changes in the conceptual-self brought about by increased perceived similarity with the outgroup. According to the Proteus Effect, users interpret their virtual representation as an extension of themselves. For example, embodying a taller avatar has been shown to increase assertiveness, and embodying an avatar with stereotypically feminine traits to enhance self-perceptions of warmth or empathy (Yee and Bailenson, 2007). As it provides an explanation for how embodiment interventions may shape self-perception, this framework is particularly relevant to studying the role of identity in shaping economic preferences and decision-making.

Taken together, these psychological mechanisms provide a foundation for understanding how embodiment interventions shape social cognition. To effectively study these questions—and particularly to examine whether these changes may translate into behavioral outcomes—careful consideration must be given to the design of the interventions. The following section offers practical guidance for implementing embodiment interventions, focusing on strategies to create and measure the body ownership illusion and identify its effects.

# 3 How to design an embodiment intervention?

## 3.1 Intervention features

The design of an embodiment intervention entails several key choices. How will participants be made to feel like the virtual body is “their own”? Will this be the main goal of the intervention or will embodied participants go on a virtual journey designed to convey information, elicit an emotional response, or provide an atypical sensory experience? Will the embodiment phase include outcome measurement, or will these be collected only post-intervention? This section explores these questions, aiming to guide economists who are considering the use of an embodiment intervention in their experimental design.<fnref n="2" />

### 3.1.1 How are participants embodied in the virtual body?

Embodiment in a virtual body requires using a headmounted display (VR headset) to view a video in which the virtual body is seen from first person perspective. In such a video, the view of the virtual environment and body (or avatar) corresponds to the gaze of the user. When looking down, he or she will see the virtual body instead of their own and feel as if they are “in the shoes” of another person. To strengthen this illusion, the visual stimuli of the video is often synchronized with additional sensory stimuli. This can take

<footnote n="2">²Chen and White (2024) provides a critical review of some of these methodological concerns.</footnote>
the form of tactile stimuli administered by an experimenter, or motor control of the virtual body afforded by the combination of a computer generated virtual environment and motion sensing equipment.<fnref n="3" />

The synchronization of sensory input creates the illusion that the participant owns the virtual body, a psychological phenomenon, called “the full body ownership illusion”, which is explained in section 2 in more detail. The section below reviews possible ways to embody participants in virtual bodies. Table 1 summarizes the section, giving examples and references of experimental papers using embodiment interventions to study questions related to social-cognition across the different embodiment protocols surveyed.

**Visuotactile synchrony** In a typical protocol for *visuotactile synchrony*, participants watch a first person perspective video of a stranger's body which is repeatedly stroked with a stick or a brush. At the same time, an experimenter applies synchronous, corresponding strokes on the participant's body (which is out of view as he or she is wearing a headset). An advantage of using this protocol is that it can be quite simple to develop. It requires filming 3D videos, which can be done using basic equipment (like two GoPro cameras), and having a headmounted display for playback. To increase realism, the videos can be filmed in specific real world settings, including the exact setup of the laboratory where the experiment is being conducted. Note that these are static videos that do not allow to navigate the virtual environment or interact with it, but rather focus on creating a strong sense of embodiment in the virtual body. A potential limitation is that, in contrast to computer based virtual environments that offer a range of possible avatars, including the possibility of tailoring these to participants' characteristics, this protocol requires carefully choosing the actors in whose bodies the participants will be embodied. Another limitation is related to its implementation, as it requires the presence of a trained (and focused) experimenter to implement the synchronized tactile stimuli for each participant.

**Visuomotor synchrony** Interventions relying on *visuomotor synchrony* use motion sensors to synchronize the movements of the avatar (visual stimuli) and those of the participant (motor stimuli). Often, the intervention will include instructions for movement designed to reinforce the illusion of ownership over the virtual body. Virtual “mirrors” showing the reflection of the virtual body can also be placed in the virtual environment. For example, in Banakou et al. (2016), embodied participants were instructed to follow a virtual Tai Chi teacher. They saw the virtual body either when looking down or via its reflection in a virtual

<footnote n="3">³Technically, synchrony with motor stimuli is also possible with third-person perspective (3PP) visual stimuli. For example, in Yee and Bailenson (2007), participants saw their avatar “from the outside”, but controlled their movement.</footnote>
mirror. Such virtual environments are designed using computer generated imagery (CGI).
This allows great flexibility but requires either using an existing platform or developing ded-
icated software. An interesting feature is the possibility to observe decisions made “inside”
the virtual environment while embodied in the virtual body, an option which is much harder
to achieve in other types of virtual environments. For example, in Peck et al. (2020), partic-
ipants were seated at a virtual desk and completed a working memory task while embodied
in their randomly assigned virtual body.

**No sensory synchrony** Not all embodiment interventions rely on sensory synchronization to create the illusion of ownership over the virtual body. Some use instructions to follow the avatar's movements (Mello et al., 2022a), or allow for partial control over the virtual environment, sometimes with additional interactive features. For example, in Herrera et al. (2018), “participants were seated throughout the experience, but navigated [the virtual environment] by moving their head and leaning their torso to look where they wanted, and selected objects by first looking at the object they wanted to interact with and then clicking on their mouse”. Other interventions use 360°-video-based VR, which allows to capture and combine scenes in a 360° perspective (Rizzo et al., 2003). These enable participants to control the perspective of the video by turning their head, without additional motor control. Interactive “hotspots” or additional text and imagery can be embedded within the videos (this is also true for the even more static 3D videos mentioned above). In this medium, the camera captures the vantage point that users experience during playback, limiting interactivity. Users cannot physically move around the virtual environment and cannot directly interact with any objects. For example, Ventura et al. (2021) use 360°-video-based VR to put male participants through the experience of a woman experiencing sexual harassment. Participants see the body of a filmed actress where their own should be, and experience a predetermined scene from her perspective while controlling the angle by moving their head.

**3.1.2 What experience do embodied participants undergo?**

While some interventions focus on creating an illusion of ownership over the virtual body,
others aim to provide a specific embodied experience. This virtual journey can take many
forms, from an intricate story-line designed to convey information and elicit an emotional
response, to an atypical sensory experience that would be nearly impossible to undergo
in the physical world. The section below reviews the main categories of virtual embodied
experiences, and is summarized in Table 2.
<table><caption>Table 1: Embodiment</caption><thead><tr><th>Type</th><th>Implementation</th><th>Examples</th><th>References</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>Visuo-tactile</td><td>Apply tactile stimuli to real body in sync with visual stimuli of strokes applied to VB. Suitable for non-computer generated VEs.</td><td>User sees VB stroked while experimenter applies synchronized strokes of corresponding length and location to the user's real body</td><td>Tacikowski et al. (2020)</td></tr><tr><td>Visuo-motor</td><td>User controls the movements of VB or avatar via motion sensors. Requires computer generated VE.</td><td>Movements of the head and limbs initiated by user are reflected in VB's behavior</td><td>Banakou et al. (2013, 2016, 2020); Beaudoin et al. (2020); Beltran et al. (2021); Bolt et al. (2021); Chowdhury and Quarles (2021); Hamilton-Giachritsis et al. (2018); Hasler et al. (2017); Kishore et al. (2019); Lopez et al. (2019); Peck et al. (2013, 2018, 2020); Seinfeld et al. (2018, 2021); Tajadura-Jiménez et al. (2017); Yee and Bailenson (2006); Neyret et al. (2020)</td></tr><tr><td>Limited control, some interactivity</td><td>Users control the perspective of the VE with their head (at minimum) and can sometimes interact with it in a limited way. Suitable for non-computer generated VEs (e.g. 360 video).</td><td>User navigates VE with head and torso movement, and can interact with virtual objects</td><td>Ahn et al. (2013); Marques et al. (2022); Herrera et al. (2018); Ventura et al. (2021)</td></tr><tr><td>No synchrony or interactivity</td><td>Only visual stimuli with no motor control or tactile stimuli. Suitable for video-based VR</td><td>User sees 1pp VB being caressed w/o being actually touched</td><td>Mello et al. (2022b)</td></tr></tbody></table>

Note: VE=virtual environment; VB=virtual body; VR=virtual reality; 1pp=first person perspective
**Story** Some embodiment interventions have rich story lines that implicitly provide information about the experience of the “other”. For example, in Herrera et al. (2018), participants experienced what it was like to become homeless by recreating lived experiences of veterans, families crippled by medical bills, victims of domestic violence, and drug addicts.

“*The narrative begins with the participants sitting in their apartment after losing their job and realizing rent is due. Despite selling most of their belongings, participants are not able to raise enough money to pay rent and are evicted from their apartment. [...] participants also interact with other non-threatening homeless people and learn about their experiences*”. Such interventions allow participants to “walk in the shoes” of a seemingly distant “other” against which they may be biased and implicitly learn about the circumstances that led to their condition, or the seemingly hidden ways in which they may be similar to themselves. One potential benefit of using VR for this purpose over more traditional “perspective taking” exercises is that it eliminates the need for explicit instructions to put oneself in the shoes of someone else, which can create experimenter demand effects, and even activate existing stereotypes (Skorinko and Sinclair, 2013).

Beyond providing a “walk in someone else’s shoes”, some interventions specifically aim to create a reversal of roles, providing participants with the *opposite* perspective. For example, in Seinfeld et al. (2021), past offenders of domestic violence experienced a scene of abuse from the perspective of the victim. In Kishore et al. (2019), officers in a US police department witnessed an interrogation of an African-American suspect alongside an officer who was racially abusive toward the suspect, either as an observer or as the victim.

The virtual environment can also allow eliciting responses from virtual characters or embodied confederates—research actors who secretly participate alongside actual subjects. For example, in Banakou et al. (2020), participants stood in a virtual street embodied in either a “white” or “black” virtual body. Virtual crowds walked by and reacted either negatively, neutrally or positively to their presence. In Hamilton-Giachritsis et al. (2018), mothers embodied as 4-year-old children interacted with a ‘mother avatar’, which responded either in a positive or negative way. Such narrative elements create a controlled experience of prejudice or mistreatment. While they are designed to elicit empathy towards the group represented by the virtual body, some research finds that such negative interactions during embodiment risks backfiring (Banakou et al., 2020; Groom et al., 2009). Banakou et al. (2020) argues that this is likely to happen if there are existing stereotypes or biases against the relevant outgroup, especially if they are activated by the nature of the task performed in the embodiment phase, and underscores the importance of carefully considering the social context captured by the VR experience.
**Experience** Other interventions aim to provide a unique sensory experience, such as that of having a disability. For example, in Chowdhury and Quarles (2021), participants engaged with a wheelchair locomotion simulation via the VR interface. In Ahn et al. (2013), participants performed a perceptual task while seeing the world through the eyes of someone who is color blind, thanks to a visual filter. In Marques et al. (2022), participants had to perform a cognitive task while experiencing psychotic symptoms designed to recreate the experience of an individual suffering from schizophrenia. These interventions allow to learn first hand and implicitly “what it feels like” to experience the world with a disability, something that incredibly challenging to achieve without immersive technology. Beyond this improvement in implementation capacity, the implicit learning afforded by embodiment interventions may allow to improve upon traditional, more explicit methods for simulating disabilities, which have sometimes been found to backfire (e.g. Silverman et al., 2015; Brown, 2010).

**Neutral** Sometimes, the purpose of the narrative elements is solely to engage in movement that allows to create the illusion of ownership over the virtual body via visuomotor synchrony. In such cases, researchers attempt to design neutral settings. For example, the embodiment phase of participants in Banakou et al. (2016) took place in the context of a virtual Tai Chi lesson. This settings appears to have been “successful” in reducing implicit racial bias for white participants embodied as blacks in the former paper, and less so in the context of gender bias of male participants embodied as women (Lopez et al., 2019).

**Static environment** Lastly, some studies have no narrative element or interactive virtual environment but rely solely on the synchronization of visual and tactile stimuli for the creation of the illusion of ownership over the virtual body. In Tacikowski et al. (2020), participants watched a video showing a stranger’s body from first person perspective and were stroked by an experimenter in synchrony with the touches that were being applied to the virtual body in the video.<fnref n="4" />

Note that the presence of narrative elements is closely tied to the relevant outgroup in the intervention. For instance, when distinct physical differences exist between groups, studies may focus on establishing a sense of ownership over a virtual body with a different skin tone, gender, or age.<fnref n="5" /> In cases where the distinction between the self and the outgroup involves how the latter experiences the world, such as physical disabilities or mental illnesses, the core

<footnote n="4">⁴Many other studies use this approach (see Ehrsson (2020) and references therein), but most of them focus on documenting the creation of the body ownership illusion and do not explore the impact of the intervention on behavior or attitudes towards outgroup members.</footnote>

<footnote n="5">⁵These are the “neutral” or “none” studies in Table 2.</footnote>
<table><caption>Table 2: Experience</caption><thead><tr><td>Type</td><td>Implementation</td><td>Examples</td><td>References</td></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>Story</td><td>Narrative is the main element of the embodied experience</td><td>User goes through the journey of becoming homeless</td><td>Banakou et al. (2020); Beltran et al. (2021); Hamilton-Giachritsis et al. (2018); Herrera et al. (2018); Kishore et al. (2019); Patané et al. (2020); Seinfeld et al. (2018, 2021); Ventura et al. (2021)</td></tr><tr><td>Experience</td><td>VE provides unique sensory experience</td><td>User experiences what it feels like to be colorblind</td><td>Ahn et al. (2013); Chowdhury and Quarles (2021); Mello et al. (2022b); Marques et al. (2022)</td></tr><tr><td>Neutral</td><td>Interactivity solely for creation of BoI, no narrative</td><td>User is encouraged to follow movements of Tai-chi instructor while seeing the body of their avatar perform corresponding movements</td><td>Banakou et al. (2013, 2016); Beaudoin et al. (2020); Beltran et al. (2021); Bolt et al. (2021); Hasler et al. (2017); Yee and Bailenson (2006); Peck et al. (2018, 2020)</td></tr><tr><td>None</td><td>Static environment</td><td>User sees virtual body from 1pp w/o the ability to move or interact with environment</td><td>Mello et al. (2022b); Tacikowski et al. (2020)</td></tr></tbody></table>

Note: VE=virtual environment; VB=virtual body; 1pp=first person perspective; BoI=body ownership illusion

of the embodied intervention lies in recreating that experience in the virtual environment.<fnref n="6" />

Additionally, when the difference between the self and the relevant outgroup relates to a social condition or status, studies tend to rely on narrative elements to convey the story of the “other” (e.g. Herrera et al., 2018). The latter approach remains pertinent even in instances where salient physical differences exist, such as interventions simulating the experience of women facing negative workplace experiences (Beltran et al., 2021) or sexual harassment (Ventura et al., 2021), or the unfair treatment experienced when embodied in a “black” virtual body (Kishore et al., 2019).<fnref n="7" /> However, as previously mentioned, some research cautions against the effectiveness of the latter type of intervention. Indeed, studies on implicit racial bias suggest that negative affect may hinder the formation of new positive associations with the outgroup represented by the virtual body, particularly if there are existing negative stereotypes against that group (Groom et al., 2009; Banakou et al., 2020).

<footnote n="6">⁶These are the “experience” studies in Table 2.</footnote>

<footnote n="7">⁷These are the “story” studies in Table 2.</footnote>
3.1.3 When are outcomes measured?

Depending on the research question and available technology, the main outcomes of the study can be measured during the embodiment phase or in a distinct stage. For a review of the *types* of outcomes that have been explored in the emerging literature, and the conclusions they allow to draw, refer to Table 5 and the discussion in section 4.

Studies exploring the effect of embodiment on prejudice towards outgroup members typ-
ically include an embodiment phase and a distinct phase of post (and sometimes pre) ex-
perimental measures. For example, participants in Banakou et al. (2016) completed an
assessment of implicit racial bias one week before, and one week after the intervention, in
which they were embodied in a “white” or “black” virtual body. However, interactive en-
vironments also allow observing behavior *inside* the virtual environment, *while* embodied
in the virtual body. For example, in Beaudoin et al. (2020) young participants performed
a motor imagery task when embodied either in an elderly or young avatars. In Tajadura-
Jiménez et al. (2017), participants embodied either in a child’s body or a scaled down adult
body estimated virtual objects’ size.<fnref n="8" />

Some interventions use “virtual cafés” to observe behavior in interactions with virtual characters. For example, in Kishore et al. (2019), police officers experienced an abusive interrogation of an African American suspect from the perspective of either a witness or the victim. Some weeks later, they witnessed aggression by an officer toward an African American man in a virtual cafe scenario, and the researchers coded their helpfulness toward the victim. Studies with less elaborate virtual environments sometimes resort to the use of confederates. For example, in Yee et al. (2009), participants were assigned either tall or short avatars and then engaged in a negotiation task with a confederate blind to their condition.

Yet another type of intervention uses the virtual environment to substitute the physical
environment of the laboratory. Participants typically sit at a virtual desk and perform the
same kind of computerized task they could perform in a real lab while embodied in the virtual
body. For example, in Peck et al. (2018, 2020), participants performed a working memory
task in the virtual environment while embodied either as males of females, in a virtual desk
setting. This approach allows to study how individuals make decisions *when embodied as
outgroup members*, like whether the performance of women in Peck et al. (2018) changed
when embodied as males versus females. This approach allows to use existing paradigms
such as economic games or cognitive tasks. Of course, these studies are by design unable

<footnote n="8">⁸Some protocols, like those relying on visuotactile synchrony or 360 video do not allow to perform a task while embodied. However, data can nevertheless be collected before the end of the embodiment phase either by integrating “hotspots” with additional development or collecting measures orally. For example, participants in Tacikowski et al. (2020) performed an implicit association task in audio form before taking of the headmounted display (and “reentering” their actual body).</footnote>
to conclude whether the effects of these intervention spillover beyond the virtual realm, a
separate question that should be explored in future work.

While most of these studies examined changes during or immediately following the illu-
sion, a few papers have specifically assessed the longevity of cognitive alterations following
virtual embodiment, and determined that some virtual embodiment manipulations induced
changes that persisted for at least one week (Banakou et al., 2016). This suggests cognitive
changes following transient modifications of embodiment can potentially persist even outside
the laboratory.

## 3.2 Design features

Beyond the decisions tending to the features of the intervention, embodiment interventions raise specific methodological concerns. What is the appropriate comparison group? How will we know embodiment worked, i.e., what are the available tools for conducting a manipulation check? This section discusses these questions while reviewing the relevant literature.

**3.2.1 What is the appropriate comparison group?**

If we formalize a typical research question in this literature as studying the effect of $X_i$ on $Y_i$, then $X_i$ is a dummy variable taking on a value of 1 if individual $i$ was embodied in a virtual body representing a different demographic (such as a female-looking body for a man), and $Y_i$ is some outcome, such as a measure of $i$'s gender identity. But what does $X=0$ represent? Or, which is the appropriate counterfactual to identify the effect of the virtual body swap, and how can it be operationalized in the lab? This section reviews the main alternatives used in the literature, with Table 3 summarizing the discussion.

**Varying the appearance of the virtual body** This is the most common source of experimental variation. Studies on racial bias often embody “white” participants in “black” virtual bodies (Peck et al., 2013; Banakou et al., 2016, 2020; Hasler et al., 2017).<fnref n="9" />,<fnref n="10" /> For example, in Peck et al. (2013), light-skinned participants were embodied either in a dark-skinned virtual body, a light-skinned virtual body, a purple virtual body, or no virtual body,<fnref n="11" /> Similarly, studies on gender typically compare “opposite-sex” embodiment to embodiment

<footnote n="9">⁹Some interventions change the virtual body's appearance because they vary participants' perspective in the scene. For example, in Kishore et al. (2019), participants witnessed an interrogation of an African American suspect alongside an officer who was racially abusive toward the suspect from either an observer's or the suspect's perspective.</footnote>

<footnote n="10">¹⁰This variation in the appearance of the virtual body builds on very similar mechanisms as the “enfacing” literature, where participants see their face replaced by a virtual one (e.g. Zhang et al., 2021).</footnote>

<footnote n="11">¹¹Participants saw a dark-skinned avatar in a virtual mirror but were not embodied themselves.</footnote>
<figure><img src="image_5.png" /><figcaption>Figure 1: Congruent embodiment versus other controls</figcaption></figure>

Note: Plots show means±SE.
SyncS=Synchronized same-sex embodiment; EL=Embodiment in light-skinned VB

in a virtual body of the same sex (Beltran et al., 2021; Bolt et al., 2021; Lopez et al., 2019; Mello et al., 2022a; Peck et al., 2018, 2020; Tacikowski et al., 2020). Studies on the effect of being embodied in a child's body have used embodiment in a scaled-down adult body as a control group (Banakou et al., 2013; Tajadura-Jiménez et al., 2017).

In these papers, *X* = 0 represents embodiment in a virtual body that looks like participants' on *one* dimension, such as skin tone. Of course, these “congruent” virtual bodies inevitably look different from participants’ on many other dimensions.<fnref n="12" /> Moreover, embodiment in a congruent virtual body may itself affect outcomes of interest. Lastly, this choice of control could create experimenter demand effects, especially in a within-subject design where embodiment in different looking virtual bodies is experienced sequentially. While the literature rarely comments on these tradeoffs explicitly, the following examples of papers with several comparison groups illustrate that it is not a trivial issue: On the one hand, Tacikowski et al. (2020) finds that participants’ self-reported gender identity following same-sex (“congruent”) embodiment was very similar to that reported in their baseline self-condition prior to any intervention (see figure 1a).<fnref n="13" /> On the other hand, Peck et al. (2013) (see figure 1b) finds that embodiment in a light-skinned virtual body (“congruent embodiment” as these were light-skinned females) was the only condition in which there was a directionally opposite effect to that of the “treatment”, embodiment in a dark-skinned

<footnote n="12">¹²Note that many of these studies also restrict the pool of participants to be only women, such that the gender of the participants and the avatars always matches (e.g. Peck et al., 2013).</footnote>

<footnote n="13">¹³This was a within-subject design, and participants’ gender identity was measured before any intervention and following three different embodiment conditions, of which same-sex embodiment was the last.</footnote>
virtual body. The latter example suggests that treating congruent embodiment as a baseline
can imply an overestimation of the effect of incongruent embodiment.

**Varying the strength of the illusion** As discussed earlier, creating a strong illusion of ownership requires synchronizing the visual stimuli of the virtual body moving around the virtual environment or being touched with the participants' own movements or sensations. Symmetrically, creating a deliberate delay between the tactile or motor input from participants' own bodies and the visual input from the headset will weaken, or extinguish the illusion of ownership. This has been demonstrated with visuotactile (Petkova and Ehrsson, 2008; Petkova et al., 2011) and visuomotor (Banakou et al., 2013) protocols.

As such, a condition where participants are embodied in the same virtual body as in the treatment, but with asynchrony between the visual and tactile or motor stimuli can serve as a control condition. For example, Tacikowski et al. (2020) varied both the appearance of the virtual body and the presence of the illusion of ownership over the virtual body. Participants were embodied in a virtual body whose sex either matched their own or not. Additionally, an experimenter applied strokes to participants' real bodies either in synchrony or not with the strokes they saw being applied to the virtual body via the headset.

In these papers, $X = 0$ represents embodiment in a virtual body in the absence of an illusion of ownership (or at least a weakened one). This allows to isolate the effect of the illusion of ownership over the virtual body, without varying its appearance or the experimental protocol. Let us again consider two examples of the use of asynchronous incongruent embodiment as a control condition.

In Tacikowski et al. (2020) (figure 2a), the "syncO" condition is the treatment - embodiment in a virtual body of the opposite sex with synchrony between visual and tactile stimuli. On average, gender identity in this condition was less congruent with participants' sex than in the "asyncO" group where embodiment was in the same incongruent virtual body, but tactile and visual stimuli were not synchronized. However, gender identity in this latter group was itself significantly less congruent with participants' sex than at baseline. In this context, using asynchronous incongruent embodiment as the only control group may have resulted in underestimating the effect of incongruent embodiment.

In Banakou et al. (2013), identification with children (measured with an IAT) was measured post-intervention in four different conditions (see figure 2b). Their design does not include a baseline condition measuring IAT scores prior to any intervention. However, it seems likely that IAT score in such a condition would lie between those of the asynchronous incongruent (child, in red) condition, and the synchronous congruent (adult, in blue) condition. In sum, while asynchronous conditions may not be appropriate to approximate a
<figure><img src="image_6.png" /><figcaption>Figure 2: Asynchronous embodiment versus other controls</figcaption></figure>

*Note:* Plots show means±SE. AsyncO=Asynchronous opposite-sex embodiment

baseline condition, they can complement other control conditions by providing more infor-
mation about the size of the “true” treatment effect.

**Varying the level of immersion** From the advent of extended reality technology, virtual body-swaps have been put forth as an immersive version of traditional perspective-taking tasks. Using VR for this purpose has several potential advantages over the traditional protocols of perspective-taking<fnref n="14" /> as undergoing an embodiment interventions is less cognitively taxing than the task of imagining to be someone else, does not rely on participants’ preexisting schemas or biases, and offers greater experimental control than providing participants with instructions to use their imagination. Several papers thus compare the effect of perspective-taking protocols to that of embodiment interventions. For example, in *Ventura et al. (2021)*, male participants were assigned to a 360°-video-based VR experience (*treatment*) or to a traditional perspective-taking task (*control*). In the first condition, they experienced a scene of sexual harassment from the embodied perspective of a woman. In the second condition, they were instructed to take the perspective of the victim and imagine themselves in her place while reading an account of the same scene.

In these papers, *X* = 0 represents a less immersive intervention, such as being instructed to take the perspective of the “other”, or receiving factual information about them. One potential criticism of this choice of control is that the two groups that are compared are different on many dimensions, such as novelty, cognitive effort, and potential enjoyment.

**Varying the features of the intervention** This is another common source of experi-
mental variation, and often accompanies a variation in the appearance of the virtual body

<footnote n="14">¹⁴See section 2 for a detailed discussion of perspective taking.</footnote>
<table><caption>Table 3: Comparison group</caption><thead><tr><td>Type</td><td>Implementation</td><td>Examples</td><td>References</td></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>Virtual body appearance</td><td>Embodiment in VB with incongruent appearance</td><td>Embodiment in either dark-skinned (intervention), light-skinned (control 1), or purple VB (control 2)</td><td>Peck et al. (2013); Banakou et al. (2016, 2020); Hasler et al. (2017); Banakou et al. (2013); Tajadura-Jiménez et al. (2017); Beltran et al. (2021); Bolt et al. (2021); Lopez et al. (2019); Mello et al. (2022a); Peck et al. (2018, 2020); Tacikowski et al. (2020)</td></tr><tr><td>Strength of illusion</td><td>Purposefully breaking the ownership illusion by creating a delay between the visual stimuli of the VB and the additional sensory stimuli (tactile or motor)</td><td>Real body is stroked either in sync (intervention) or with a delay (control) with respect to the strokes seen applied to the embodied VB of the opposite sex</td><td>Tacikowski et al. (2020); Banakou et al. (2013)</td></tr><tr><td>Perspective</td><td>Embodiment as different virtual characters in the same scene or story</td><td>Participants witness an interrogation of an African American suspect alongside an officer who was racially abusive toward the suspect, either as the victim (intervention) or as an observer (control)</td><td>Kishore et al. (2019); Neyret et al. (2020)</td></tr><tr><td>Embodied experience</td><td>Variation in the sensory experience or the narrative of the embodied experience</td><td>Participants embodied in black VB have either neutral (control), positive (intervention 1) or negative (intervention 2) interactions with a virtual crowd</td><td>Banakou et al. (2020, 2016); Beltran et al. (2021); Chowdhury and Quarles (2021); Hamilton-Giachritsis et al. (2018); Hasler et al. (2017); Marques et al. (2022); Patané et al. (2020); Peck et al. (2020, 2013)</td></tr><tr><td>Immersiveness</td><td>Variation in the immersiveness of the PP technology</td><td>Participants either read information and statistics about the homeless (control), read a written account from 1PP of what it would be like to become homeless with PT instructions (intervention 1), experienced what it was like to become homeless in 2D interactive narrative (intervention 2), or inside an VE from 1PP (intervention 3).</td><td>Ahn et al. (2013); Herrera et al. (2018); Ventura et al. (2021)</td></tr></tbody></table>

Note: VE=virtual environment; VB=virtual body; 1pp=first person perspective; IVE=interactive VE; PT=perspective-taking
to create a 2×2 (or more) design. Several papers study the social or emotional context of the embodied experience. For example, in Banakou et al. (2020) participants stood in a virtual street embodied in a “white” or “black” body, with crowds of virtual characters walking by and engaging in negative, neutral or positive interactions. In Beltran et al. (2021), participants were embodied either as males or females and experienced negative or positive workplace experiences. In Hamilton-Giachritsis et al. (2018), mothers embodied as children had positive or negative interactions with a mother avatar.

Other papers vary the appearance of virtual characters encountered during the embodied experience (Hasler et al., 2017; Peck et al., 2013; Banakou et al., 2016), the kind of activity in which embodied participants engage with a confederate—a research actor who secretly participates alongside actual subjects— (Patané et al., 2020), or the use of priming information relevant to the appearance of the virtual body (Peck et al., 2020). Such experimental variations have, for example, allowed to demonstrate that the effect of “incongruent” embodiment can be dependent on the social context of the embodied experience (Banakou et al., 2020).

To conclude, different comparison groups provide different parts of the puzzle of understanding the effect of an embodiment intervention. Let us illustrate this with an example in the setting of Ventura et al. (2021), where men either experienced a scene of sexual harassment from the embodied perspective of a woman or by reading its account with perspective-taking instructions. We can imagine another embodiment condition where men take the perspective of a male victim. This additional control could shed light on whether the findings of the paper are driven by the illusion of ownership over a female virtual body, or the immersive experience of a harassment victim.

### 3.2.2 How do we know embodiment was successful?

Before examining the state of the art of the literature in the next section, it is worthwhile reviewing the different methods used in the embodiment literature to test whether the intervention succeeded in inducing an illusion of ownership over the virtual body (also termed ‘Body Ownership Illusions’ – BOIs). These are summarized in Table 4.

Early studies on BOIs focused on demonstrating their existence. As such, they typically included a range of qualitative and quantitative metrics. One common method of testing if the illusion of ownership over the virtual body has been induced successfully is to examine whether embodied participants respond to threats to the virtual body. Studies have found that such threats induce behavioral responses, such as trying to avoid the threat (Gonzalez-Franco et al., 2010; Kilteni et al., 2012), as well as physiological responses to the threat. The latter include changes in arousal as measured by skin conductance (Petkova and Ehrsc
<table><caption>Table 4: Manipulation check</caption><thead><tr><td>Type</td><td>Example(s)</td><td>References</td></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>BOI questionnaire</td><td>Questionnaire measuring strength of ownership over VB and related measures</td><td>All other papers</td></tr><tr><td>Combination</td><td>BOI questionnaire + skin conductance levels following virtual knife threat</td><td>Tacikowski et al. (2020)</td></tr><tr><td>Intervention specific</td><td>"How colorblind did you feel during the practice session?"; "How difficult was it to complete the color matching task during the practice session?".</td><td>Ahn et al. (2013); Herrera et al. (2018)</td></tr><tr><td>None</td><td>No specific measure of the strength of the illusion of ownership over VB</td><td>Marques et al. (2022); Seinfeld et al. (2021); Yee and Bailenson (2007, 2006)</td></tr></tbody></table>

Note: BOI=Body ownership illusion; VB=virtual body

son, 2008; Petkova et al., 2011), heart rate deceleration (Maselli and Slater, 2013; Slater et al., 2010), changes in body temperature (Moseley et al., 2008; Hohwy and Paton, 2010) and temperature sensitivity (Llobera et al., 2013), as well as changes in muscle contraction measured by changes in electrical activity (Slater et al., 2008).

There is also evidence of brain activation in brain regions expected to respond to the threat. For example, a study using electroencephalogram (EEG, which measures electrical activity in the brain using electrodes attached to the scalp) found activation in a region in the brain associated with reaction to threats when an embodied virtual hand was stabbed with a virtual knife (González-Franco et al., 2014). Due to ease and practicality, the most prevalent form of manipulation check in the embodiment literature is questionnaires measuring the strength of the illusion of ownership over the virtual body.<fnref n="15" /> Despite the subjective and ex-post nature of these questionnaires, which first raised concerns regarding their internal vality (e.g. Slater, 2004), a large body of studies has found that the objective measures detailed above are strongly correlated with these subjective assessments (González-Franco et al., 2014; Padrao et al., 2016).

Many current embodiment questionnaires are versions of the original “rubber hand” questionnaire (Botvinick and Cohen, 1998), which are modified by researchers to fit the context of their specific intervention. As such, it can be challenging to compare and aggregate the

<footnote n="15">¹⁵Studies with a narrative intervention often use a presence questionnaire in addition (or in combination) with the aforementioned body ownership illusion questionnaires (e.g. Kishore et al., 2019).</footnote>
results of different papers. A methodological paper by Gonzalez-Franco and Peck (2018) compiles and classifies the questions in such questionnaires used in previous experiments, pointing to the following main categories – body ownership, agency and motor control of the body (when relevant), tactile sensations (when relevant), location of the body (participants must feel that their body is in the same location as the virtual body in order to experience an embodiment illusion), external appearance (either in line or not with own appearance), response to external stimuli (if relevant, often accompanied by an objective measure of the kind described above). Building on this categorization, they propose a standardized questionnaire that remains flexible enough to adjust to the relevant features of the intervention while conserving the ability to compare results across overlapping components.

In sum, while most studies use questionnaires as a manipulation check, some combine different measures, others develop a manipulation check specific to the intervention, and yet others do not include a manipulation check at all. Table 4 provides references for these different categories.

# 4 State of the art

Before turning to the evidence on how outgroup embodiment may affect prejudice and identity, the following section first clarifies how these are *measured* in the embodiment literature. Studies draw on a wide range of indicators, and the choice of outcome shapes both the interpretation and comparability of findings. After outlining the main measurement approaches used in existing work, the next section then reviews the state of the art on how embodiment interventions affect prejudice and, subsequently, how they influence identity.

## 4.1 What types of outcomes are used?

### 4.1.1 Implicit Outcomes

Prejudice often operates unconsciously, even when individuals consciously reject its more explicit forms (Dovidio et al., 2002). A common way to measure such *implicit* attitudes is the Implicit Association Test (IAT), which evaluates the strength of automatic associations between concepts. IATs measuring *attitudes* use the reaction times of participants asked to pair categories and attributes (Greenwald et al., 1998). If a participant pairs male faces with good attributes and female faces with bad attributes faster than the reverse, this indicates a bias in favor of males.

Beyond implicit attitudes, IATs can be used to implicitly measure identity and stereotypes (Greenwald et al., 2002): *Identity* IATs measure associations between “self” and
<table><caption>Table 5: Outcomes of Embodiment Interventions</caption><thead><tr><th>Type</th><th>Outcome</th><th>Implementation</th><th>Example(s)</th><th>References</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td rowspan="2">Implicit</td><td>Implicit attitudes</td><td>IAT</td><td>Implicit racial or gender bias</td><td>Banakou et al. (2016, 2020); Beltran et al. (2021); Chowdhury et al. (2019); Mello et al. (2022b); Patané et al. (2020); Lopez et al. (2019); Peck et al. (2013)</td></tr><tr><td>Implicit identity</td><td>IAT</td><td>Self and men/women</td><td>Banakou et al. (2013); Tacikowski et al. (2020); Tajadura-Jiménez et al. (2017); Lopez et al. (2019)</td></tr><tr><td rowspan="3">Self-reported</td><td>empathy</td><td>questionnaire</td><td>Empathy towards the homeless</td><td>Herrera et al. (2018)</td></tr><tr><td>inclusion of other in the self (IoS)</td><td>questionnaire</td><td>Self and colorblind confederate</td><td>Ahn et al. (2013); Herrera et al. (2018); Ventura et al. (2021)</td></tr><tr><td>perspective taking</td><td>questionnaire</td><td>PT ability with respect to harassment victim</td><td>Ventura et al. (2021)</td></tr><tr><td rowspan="4">Cognitive</td><td>emotion recognition</td><td>perceptual task</td><td>Recognition of fearful facial emotions</td><td>Seinfeld et al. (2018)</td></tr><tr><td>working memory</td><td>saccade and N-back task</td><td>With(out) threat of gender stereotype</td><td>Peck et al. (2018, 2020)</td></tr><tr><td>visual perception</td><td>object size estimation in VE</td><td>Object size estimation (child VB)</td><td>Banakou et al. (2013); Tajadura-Jiménez et al. (2017)</td></tr><tr><td>motor imagery</td><td>self-cuing (in VE)</td><td>Time imagined for action (elderly VB)</td><td>Beaudoin et al. (2020)</td></tr><tr><td rowspan="2">Physiological</td><td>skin conductance</td><td>physiological response</td><td>Response to threats to the virtual body</td><td>Mello et al. (2022b); Tacikowski et al. (2020); Tajadura-Jiménez et al. (2017)</td></tr><tr><td>voice pitch</td><td>recorded measures</td><td>Shifts following embodiment in a different body</td><td>Tajadura-Jiménez et al. (2017)</td></tr><tr><td rowspan="4">Behavioral</td><td>virtual</td><td>virtual cafés</td><td>Intervene when witnessing harassment</td><td>Kishore et al. (2019)</td></tr><tr><td>confederate</td><td>observational studies</td><td>Interactions with confederate in VE</td><td>Ahn et al. (2013); Yee and Bailenson (2006)</td></tr><tr><td>incentivized choice</td><td>economic game</td><td>Willingness to compete</td><td>Bolt et al. (2021); Rapoport (2026)</td></tr><tr><td>other</td><td>Various methods</td><td>Write a letter to public official</td><td>Herrera et al. (2018)</td></tr></tbody></table>

Note: IAT=Implicit Association Task; VB=virtual body; VE=virtual environment; PT=perspective-taking
"other" with contrasting concepts (e.g., male vs. female; family vs. career), while stereotype IATs pair social categories (e.g., Asian vs. Hispanic) with specific traits (Sriram and Greenwald, 2009). Although the IAT faces its share of criticism (see for example Fiedler et al., 2006; Schimmack, 2021), there is evidence that it can predict real-world behaviors, such as hiring decisions involving minority groups (Rooth, 2010), and it still is widely considered a useful tool in many contexts (e.g. see Jost, 2019). In body-swap research, IATs have been used to measure shifts in implicit attitudes towards outgroups (e.g. Peck et al., 2013), as well as changes in gender identity (Tacikowski et al., 2020).

### 4.1.2 Self-reported Outcomes

A substantial portion of the body-swap literature relies on explicit self-reported measures. For instance, Herrera et al. (2018) use a range of self-reported outcomes to assess the effect of their intervention on perception of the homeless. They examine explicit attitudes by measuring participants' agreement with statements such as "*Most homeless people could have avoided becoming homeless*" and "*Our society does not do enough to help homeless people*". Closeness with the homeless is measured with the IoS visual scale, which shows pictures with two circles—one representing the self and one representing the homeless—that range from being completely distinct, indicating total separateness, or fully merged, indicating total inclusion.<fnref n="16" /> Participants also rate their feelings of empathy and personal distress experienced during the intervention, and answer questions on dehumanization of the homeless.

### 4.1.3 Cognitive Outcomes

These outcomes use tasks measuring various cognitive processes, such as working memory, emotion recognition, visual perception, and motor imagery. As such, they provide more objective measures of the effects of virtual body-swaps. For example, Peck et al. (2020) use an N-back task measuring working memory to identify the effect of opposite-sex embodiment on stereotype threat. In the context of age-swaps, Tajadura-Jiménez et al. (2017) use an object size estimation task to understand how embodiment in a child's body affects participants' perception of their environment.

### 4.1.4 Physiological Outcomes

Physiological outcomes are an additional type of objective outcome, and are typically used to measure the strength of the illusion of ownership over the virtual body. As such, they are often used as manipulation checks in studies on the consequences of creating such an illusion.

<footnote n="16">¹⁶Similar to IATs, the framework can be used to measure attitudes, identity, or stereotypes.</footnote>
Skin conductance, for example, has been used to measure whether participants respond to threats to the virtual body (Petkova and Ehrsson, 2008; Petkova et al., 2011).<sup>17</sup> Beyond the realm of manipulation checks, voice pitch is sometimes recorded to detect shifts following embodiment in a virtual body of a different age or gender (Tajadura-Jiménez et al., 2017).

### 4.1.5 Behavioral Outcomes

Evidence pertaining to consequential decisions, such as the incentivized choices typically used in experimental economics, remains scarce in the body-swap literature. Even in the few studies that rise to this challenge, most experiments either fail to meet the ethical standard of experiments in economics, provide evidence only on secondary outcomes, or are designed in ways that make them susceptible to issues of experimenter demand effects or limited external validity.

For example, following embodiment as a homeless person, Herrera et al. (2018) ask participants about their willingness to sign a real petition supporting increased affordable housing for vulnerable populations. Participants were later presented with what they believed to be the actual petition and offered the opportunity to sign it, only to be debriefed several weeks later that it was not real. They were also asked if they would like to donate part of their compensation to a homeless shelter, with all participants receiving full compensation regardless of their choice. Some time after their lab participation, participants were contacted and prompted to write letters to an elected official and a friend to describe their experience and express their perspective on the issue.

Other studies have used confederates—research actors who secretly participate alongside actual subjects—to prompt behavior following the body-swap intervention (e.g., Ahn et al., 2013). Depending on the implementation details, this approach could also pose ethical concerns, as participants may be misled into thinking their involvement had concluded before the interaction with the confederate.

Another approach is to observe behavior within the virtual environment, sometimes referred to as “virtual cafés.” For instance, Kishore et al. (2019) assessed whether participants intervened to help a virtual character, an African American man being abused by a police officer. The external validity of such outcomes is not yet well established.

To date, Bolt et al. (2021) is the only published study employing an incentivized framework aligned with experimental economics, adapting tasks from Jones and Rachlin (2006) to measure the effect of a virtual gender-swap on social and temporal decision-making. In a similar vein, Rapoport (2026) uses the seminal design of Niederle and Vesterlund (2007) to assess the effect of a virtual gender-swap on selection into competitive environments.

<footnote n="17">¹⁷See 3.2.2 for more examples and references.</footnote>
## 4.2 How do embodiment interventions affect these outcomes?

### 4.2.1 Prejudice

The section below reviews the effects of embodiment interventions on prejudice, categorizing studies into four areas: race, gender, age, and disability or illness.

**Race** A growing body of literature finds that embodiment in a virtual body of a different skin tone can lead to a reduction in racial bias (Banakou et al., 2016, 2020; Hasler et al., 2017; Kishore et al., 2019; Patané et al., 2020; Peck et al., 2013; Salmanowitz, 2018; Thériault et al., 2021). However, two published studies found negative effects (Groom et al., 2009; Maloney, 2018).<fnref n="18" />

This literature points to the importance of the emotional valence of the virtual experience. Banakou et al. (2020) demonstrates that experiencing a negative virtual social interaction while embodied as an outgroup member can lead to an increase in implicit racial bias, hypothesizing this is likely to occur if there are existing negative stereotypes associated with the relevant group. Similarly, Patané et al. (2020) finds that outgroup embodiment induces a reduction in implicit racial-bias following a virtual cooperative interaction with an outgroup member, but not when the interaction is neutral.<fnref n="19" />

Few studies on racial prejudice directly compare the effect of embodiment to an alternative intervention.<fnref n="20" /> Thériault et al. (2021) finds no greater decrease in ethnic prejudice as compared to a traditional perspective intervention, and Kishore et al. (2019) find that being embodied as an outgroup member undergoing unfair treatment (first-person perspective) is more effective than being embodied as an observer (third-person perspective).

**Gender** The findings on the effect of virtual gender-swaps on gender prejudice are mixed. While some studies report a reduction in gender bias after embodying an opposite-sex avatar (Beltran et al., 2021; Gonzalez-Liencres et al., 2020; Starr et al., 2019; Ventura et al., 2021), others suggest that it may actually exacerbate bias (Lopez et al., 2019; Schulze et al., 2019), and still others find no significant effect (Freedman et al., 2021).

Emotional valence appears to play a role in the outcomes of these interventions, though differently from studies on racial bias. For instance, Beltran et al. (2021) found that im-

<footnote n="18">¹⁸Maloney (2018) found that white participants in a virtual shooter game showed stronger implicit racial bias against Blacks when being embodied in a Black relative to White avatar; Groom et al. (2009) found that participants showed stronger implicit bias against Black people after embodying a Black compared to White avatar. In their intervention, embodied participants underwent a virtual job interview.</footnote>

<footnote n="19">¹⁹They find that participants in the neutral group who felt closer to outgroup members post-intervention also exhibited a reduction in implicit racial bias.</footnote>

<footnote n="20">²⁰Most have control conditions that vary the appearance of the avatar or the content of the virtual experience.</footnote>
plicit gender bias was reduced when participants embodied an opposite-sex avatar during a
negative workplace scenario, but no such reduction occurred following a positive scenario.
Another important factor is how much participants identify with the virtual body. Gonzalez-Liencres et al. (2020) observed that a higher level of identification with the virtual woman correlated with a greater decrease in prejudice against women.

When comparing virtual gender-swaps to other forms of perspective-taking, Ventura et al. (2021) found that embodying a female victim of sexual harassment led to higher empathy, a greater sense of oneness, and better perspective-taking compared to simply reading an account of the event. Meanwhile, Gonzalez-Liencres et al. (2020) demonstrated that men embodying a woman during a scene of intimate partner violence—whether from a first- or third-person perspective—showed reduced prejudice against women, with no significant difference between the two perspectives.

**Age** Several studies have examined the effects of embodying a virtually older body on age-related prejudice. Three studies report reductions in ageism after the intervention (Banakou et al., 2018; La Rocca et al., 2020; Oh et al., 2016), though a second study by Oh et al. (2016) found no significant effect. Another study explored embodying a child's body to foster empathy towards children, with encouraging results for its potential use in parenting interventions (Hamilton-Giachritsis et al., 2018). However, there are too few studies to provide insights into mediators or compare effectiveness with other interventions.

**Disability and illness** The potential for virtual body-swaps to reduce prejudice toward individuals with an illness or disability shows consistently encouraging results. All published studies indicate positive effects from these interventions. Most of these studies compare embodiment conditions to less immersive (e.g., 2D or desktop) or less engaging (e.g., factual information) control groups (Ahn et al., 2013; Chowdhury et al., 2019; Chowdhury and Quarles, 2021; Christofi et al., 2020; Hadjipanayi and Michael-Grigoriou, 2020; Marques et al., 2022; Yuen and Mak, 2021).

4.2.2 Identity

This section reviews the findings on the effects of embodiment interventions on identity.
A central concept in this field is the Proteus effect, which is explained in more detail in
the introduction. This phenomenon describes how embodiment in a virtual body influences
behaviors and mental processes to align with the attributes and stereotypes associated with
that body (Yee and Bailenson, 2007). Existing research has primarily focused on the effects
of embodying a body of a different age, such as that of a child, or a different gender.<fnref n="21" /> In line
with the Proteus effect, Banakou et al. (2013) finds that embodiment in a child-like virtual
body strengthens self-association with child-like personality traits, while Tajadura-Jiménez
et al. (2017) finds that a similar intervention leads to a shift toward a higher-pitched voice.

In the context of gender, Peck et al. (2018) finds that female participants are less sensitive to stereotype threat when embodying a male avatar compared to when embodying a female avatar. This results in impaired working memory after being informed that women typically perform worse than men on a working memory task, an effect not observed when they embody a male avatar. Peck et al. (2020) replicates this and further finds that male participants experience similar impairments in working memory when embodying a female avatar, but not when embodying a male avatar. Another study by Mello et al. (2022a) finds that heterosexual participants rate virtual caresses on intimate areas from an avatar of the same sex as more pleasant when they are embodied in the opposite sex, compared to when they are embodied in the same-sex. This effect was particularly pronounced in men, and was accompanied by corresponding physiological measures of arousal.

As to gender identity, a series of studies by Tacikowski et al. (2020) demonstrates that a few minutes of OSE was able to shift both implicit and explicit measures of gender identity toward a more balanced identification with both genders, and yield corresponding changes in gender-stereotyped beliefs about oneself. However, two papers exploring the effect of gender swaps on preferences and choices were unable to replicate this result on gender identity, and did not find that opposite-sex embodiment led to decreased gender gaps in behavior. Specifically, Bolt et al. (2021) finds that participants behave less prosocially when embodying different-gender avatars, regardless of their biological sex. It also finds that women make more impatient choices when embodying male avatars than female ones. Rapoport (2026) finds that both women's math performance and their willingness to compete declines after embodiment, regardless of the sex of the virtual body. These unexpected findings point to important ethical considerations. As immersive technologies become increasingly common in education (Radianti et al., 2020), therapy (Freeman et al., 2017), and organizations (Vasarainen et al., 2021), it is crucial to ensure their use does not inadvertently reinforce gender inequality or lead to other unintended negative repercussions.

<footnote n="21">²¹There is also research where the virtual body does not represent a different social group but instead features different physical characteristics, such as height or attractiveness. These are not covered here.</footnote>
# 5 Conclusion

Embodiment interventions provide a novel methodological toolkit for studying questions at the core of economic inequality across groups. By allowing individuals to temporarily inhabit bodies representing members of different ethnic groups, gender, or other social categories, these interventions offer a way to experimentally study two socio-cognitive mechanisms: prejudice, which shapes discriminatory behavior on the demand side, and identity, which shapes selection into educational and occupational environments on the supply-side.

The evidence reviewed in this paper shows that embodiment can reduce certain forms of prejudice under specific conditions, particularly in the domains of race, age, and disability. Yet these attitudinal shifts do not always generalize across contexts, and it remains an open question whether they translate into meaningful changes in consequential behaviors such as hiring, promotion, or harassment. More systematic work—especially using incentivized laboratory or lab-in-the-field designs—is needed to assess whether and when embodiment-induced reductions in prejudice affect decisions that matter for economic outcomes.

Research on the identity-side has even more open questions. A number of studies document that outgroup embodiment can activate or attenuate stereotype threat, or alter perceptions of one's own traits. However, evidence on whether these shifts influence economically relevant choices—such as willingness to compete or take on a leadership role, or affect social preferences—remains extremely limited and, in some cases, yields unexpected or counterintuitive results. Understanding how embodiment shapes identity salience and how this might translate into selection into fields of study, occupations, and career trajectories is an important direction for future research.

For economists, a central challenge is to integrate embodiment interventions into research designs that allow for causal identification of their behavioral consequences while meeting ethical standards required for work involving identity and social categories. Combining embodiment with tools from experimental economics—such as incentivized tasks, structured belief elicitations, and clearly defined behavioral outcomes—can help move the literature toward stronger evidence on when, why, and for whom embodiment matters.

Overall, embodiment interventions offer a promising complement to existing approaches for studying inequality across groups defined by gender, race, or other social categories. By temporarily altering how individuals perceive themselves and others, they create unique opportunities to investigate mechanisms that are otherwise difficult to manipulate experimentally. Realizing this promise requires careful design, transparent measurement, and a clear focus on linking psychological shifts to the behaviors that ultimately shape inequality across social groups.
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