Imagine you’re in your school or office when the fire alarm goes off. You snake your way through the corridors, avoiding explosions and walking through clouds of black smoke. All the while, the alarm bells continue to blare in your ears. Your vision narrows as your body gets weak from the smoke and the physical exertion. Just when you feel like you’re about to collapse, you see someone trapped under a fallen piece of debris. He desperately begs for you to help him. What do you do?
This is the stressful scenario portrayed in a virtual reality simulation that psychologist Indrajeet Patil and his colleagues used to test altruism. In a study published on Wednesday in the journal Neuropsychologia, Patil and his fellow researchers found that test subjects who helped the struggling colleague also possessed a larger right anterior insula. This part of the brain, according to the authors, is associated with emotional processing in social situations.
For the purposes of this study, the researchers defined altruism as helping behavior that comes with a significant risk to one’s own life. Patil says that VR offered him and his colleagues a unique way to test altruism without putting anyone in danger.
“In order to study this variety of altruism in an ethically acceptable way in the controlled environment of a lab, we created a novel and emotionally engaging virtual reality environment,” he tells Inverse. He and his colleagues predicted that these results would match subjects’ self-reported feelings of warmth and compassion for others.
In the video, you can see that the subject encounters the ailing man just as the subject’s vital energy is nearing its bottom. This moment tests whether the subject will help someone when their own life is at stake. And even though the simulation is just VR and not real, it’s pretty anxiety-inducing.
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Source: Inverse