Knowing Me, Knowing You: An Epistemological Account of Prosocial Behaviour Promoting Virtual Reality

Abstract Prosocial behaviour–promoting virtual reality (PBP-VR) has become an increasingly popular tool in workplace anti-sexism and anti-racism training. These simulations place users in first-person perspectives where they virtually embody female- or people of colour (POC) –coded avatars and encounter instances of sexism or racism enacted by non-player characters. Advocates of these simulations suggest that such immersive ‘perspective taking’ allows users to learn things about the experiences of women and POC that traditional empathy training cannot teach. However, the nature and extent of the knowledge PBP-VR may impart remains deeply contested. Private-sector developers often overstate its epistemic power, claiming users can ‘know what it is like’ to be marginalised. Philosophical critiques, by contrast, emphasise the limits of virtual reality (VR) as a knowledge imparter, while social scientists frequently imply – without explicitly theorising – that PBP-VR’s capacity to elicit empathy gives rise to an understanding of others’ experiences. I argue that these positions – overstatement, scepticism, and evasion – fail to capture what PBP-VR might actually afford. While virtual embodiment cannot impart first-person phenomenological knowledge of what it is like to be a woman or POC – since such knowledge is necessarily limited to one’s own lived experience – neither is it epistemically inert. This paper develops a positive account of the epistemological affordances and limits of PBP-VR. I argue that, under certain conditions, the interaction between VR’s objective features and users’ subjective affective responses can generate grounded inferential knowledge : a form of knowledge that integrates propositional content with phenomenological self-knowledge to justify inferences about common experiential patterns among women and POC. Properly understood, I propose that PBP-VR offers a modest but theoretically defensible mode of learning about others’ experiences.