Can Virtual Reality Bring Climate Change Closer to Home? Bay Area Researchers Think So

Imagine the first time you visit Nashville, Tennessee, you commission a private helicopter tour.

You gaze down on the gleaming glass buildings of its contemporary skyline, its neighborhood ball fields, the main drags with brick concert venues, and the sparkling blue pools. But then the pilot tells you some of these neighborhoods have flooded, which has been getting worse due to climate change.

When you go back home, do you think about Nashville? Do you care about the residents there, and how they’re dealing with climate change?

Researchers at a lab in Stanford have found, through early experiments, that most people say yes, regardless of their political orientation.

The scientists did not pony up hundreds of thousands to fly people to Nashville and hire private helicopters. Instead, they immersed them in the city by using virtual reality headsets.

They found people felt more connected to the places where they traveled, even if they weren’t previously familiar with them, and that climate-related impacts like flooding felt more personally relevant.

The study suggests that instead of trying to engage people in climate change through fear or guilt, giving people agency to explore a place through immersive virtual reality can boost their concern for it, similar to how someone may feel after actually visiting a place.

“This is big,” said Jeremy Bailenson, a Stanford professor who oversaw the study. “There’s lots of things we can start doing now. We can start making you care more about the people in that place. We can just make the Earth a little smaller.”

Shrinking ‘psychological’ distance

For social scientists studying climate change, there’s a reason why people tend to avoid these issues. Researchers call it “psychological distance.”

It refers to the distance we feel when it comes to climate change. With the exception of increasingly common local extreme weather, we think the impacts of climate change are happening elsewhere or feel different from the people it affects most severely. Some feel the worst effects won’t happen soon, and others are uncertain; they don’t know exactly how bad the results of inaction will be.

To attempt to shrink some of that distance, at least geographically, Stanford researchers outfitted participants with VR headsets. Participants then traveled, virtually, to places they identified as either familiar or unfamiliar to them, like the North Shore of Massachusetts, Miami or Nashville. They hovered above the terrain, as though in an aircraft, as they looked down on the homes, streets, and backyards below.

While participants saw these regions as tranquil, sunny places, with no humans or cars disturbing the quiet, they heard a simple news story about the impacts of climate-induced flooding on the locations.

Afterwards, researchers found people cared more about the places they visited, even those that were unfamiliar, and the effects climate change is having on the locations. Concern for distant places carried through regardless of participants’ political orientation.

Control groups heard similar news stories about flooding, but were shown still photographs of places both familiar and unfamiliar. They did not report caring in the same way as those who were immersed in VR.

Bailenson is the founder of Stanford’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab, a research center studying the psychological and behavioral impacts of virtual and augmented reality, the latter of which overlays digital images onto the real world. He’s worked on experiments aimed at increasing people’s focus on climate change for more than a decade, having found some success. His team discovered that when people put on a VR headset and cut down a tree, feeling the vibration of the chainsaw, they use less paper afterward.

He’s also spent years and “hundreds of thousands of dollars” building virtual reality films that place the participant underwater, witnessing ocean acidification. When people put on the headset, these experiences changed their attitudes and behaviors. But when researchers installed the VR in a museum or other exhibit, people chose not to engage: It was too much doom and gloom.

The idea to simply travel to a new place through VR, hover above it, and check it out as a way of building a sense of connection came from the mind of Monique Santoso, a third-year doctoral student in Stanford’s communication department.

“I’ve always been very fascinated with this idea of psychological distance,” Santoso said. “What exactly is it that makes these issues that are actually very important seem super far away from us?”

Santoso and her team, including her advisor Bailenson, used preexisting tools that are low-cost or free, like Google Earth and Fly, a VR app that allows you to explore the world by flying above it, plus a headset, to send people to another location.

With these tools, “you can poke your head over your neighbor’s fence and see what’s on the other side. You can fly through New York City,” Bailenson said.

When coral bleaching feels personal

Santoso’s idea came from her own life experience. She grew up in a small coastal community in Indonesia. Her backyard was a beach, and she spent hours scuba diving. She was deeply aware of ocean acidification and its effects on the coral she loved.

But when she went abroad to an international high school in Armenia, she was baffled when other people didn’t want to talk about climate change and its consequences, despite studying it in class.

“I think people just felt like it was not applicable to them,” Santoso said. She got her undergraduate degree from Middlebury College in Vermont, and further realized how far climate change was from people’s minds. Disheartened, Santoso looked for innovative ways to talk about an issue close to her heart.

She found storytelling was effective; she’d often tell her own stories of coral. Then she read Bailenson’s book Experience on Demand. She was so inspired by the central idea that virtual reality can be transformative that she applied to get her PhD at Stanford, focusing on using immersive technologies to foster empathy.

“I thought, ‘Wow, if this media could be done in scale, that could really potentially influence how people think and care about climate change,’” she said.

As the first of its kind, Santoso’s work still needs to be replicated, and across a much larger spectrum of people.

The research involved only 163 participants, all of whom are Stanford students. The results, therefore, “are a little bit less generalizable,” said Emiliana Simon Thomas, the science director at UC Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Center.

But “it’s really provocative that [the] team can get those systematic changes in kind of people’s feelings of connection to a cause or to an idea,” she said.

Santoso wants to look at how enduring these effects are, too, or if they would last longer if participants do this type of exercise on a few repeat occasions.

If the results of the first experiment hold, Santoso sees a future for this kind of VR in school curricula or for policymakers to have a better sense of the communities they represent.