By Anne C. Mulkern and ClimeWire
STANFORD, Calif. — Inside a lab on the Stanford University campus here, students experienced what it might feel like to be a cow. They donned a virtual reality helmet and walked on hands and feet while in a virtual mirror they saw themselves as bovine. As the animal was jabbed with an electrical prod, a lab worker poked a volunteer’s side with a sticklike device. The ground shook to simulate the prod’s vibrations. The cow at the end was led toward a slaughterhouse.
Sculpture "Hold me close to your heart" by Patricia Piccinini.
Participants then recorded what they ate for the next week. The study sought to uncover whether temporarily “becoming” a cow prompted reduced meat consumption.
The motivation wasn’t to make people vegetarians, said Jeremy Bailenson, director of Stanford’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab. But the project hoped to uncover whether virtual reality could alter behaviors that tax the environment and contribute to climate change. “If somebody becomes an animal, do they gain empathy for that animal and think about its plight?” Bailenson asked. “In this case, empathy toward the animal also coincides with an environmental benefit, which is that [not eating] animals consumes less energy.”
It’s one of several environment-related experiments Bailenson is conducting in the lab, all tailored toward revealing whether there are new ways to encourage environmental preservation. Volunteers also have virtually chopped down a tree, a study aimed at examining attitudes toward paper use. Others took a virtual reality shower while eating lumps of coal — literally consuming it — to gain insight into how much was needed to heat the water.