Misfit
Lawful neutral
Could Living as a Virtual Cow Make You Go Vegan? | Motherboard
Stanford researcher Jeremy Bailenson and his colleagues at the Virtual Human Interaction Lab (VHIL) are transforming people into cows. Participants in their immersive virtual reality programs not only see themselves as bovines in a virtual mirror, but they also get virtually poked with cattle prods and eventually are helplessly dragged to the virtual slaughterhouse.
Superficially, this might seem a little bizarre, but there is a purpose: Bailenson hopes that by spending a few moments in a cow’s hooves, his subjects will gain a sense of empathy about what the animals experience. The implications, from his point of view, are huge: this empathy may translate into people eating less meat, which in turn translates into less energy consumption. By making climate change, an otherwise “slow, gradual, and nonlinear” process, seem more immediate and consequential, these experiments can alter human behavior.
Stanford researcher Jeremy Bailenson and his colleagues at the Virtual Human Interaction Lab (VHIL) are transforming people into cows. Participants in their immersive virtual reality programs not only see themselves as bovines in a virtual mirror, but they also get virtually poked with cattle prods and eventually are helplessly dragged to the virtual slaughterhouse.
Superficially, this might seem a little bizarre, but there is a purpose: Bailenson hopes that by spending a few moments in a cow’s hooves, his subjects will gain a sense of empathy about what the animals experience. The implications, from his point of view, are huge: this empathy may translate into people eating less meat, which in turn translates into less energy consumption. By making climate change, an otherwise “slow, gradual, and nonlinear” process, seem more immediate and consequential, these experiments can alter human behavior.
