Overconfidence and Prosocial Behavior-Promoting Virtual Reality

Abstract Eliana Mary Horn (2026) proposes an account of how we ought to understand prosocial behavior-promoting virtual reality that forms a middle ground between an overly optimistic and overly pessimistic perspective. Horn argues that the right sort of engagement with virtual reality cannot provide us with knowledge of what it is like to be a marginalized person, but it can provide us with a form of grounded inferential knowledge related to the marginalized perspective. As such, virtual reality scenarios can still be used to promote prosocial behavior on a more realistic basis. Starting with Horn’s position, I ask whether the framework entails a risk of users of virtual reality becoming too overconfident in their understanding of the marginalized people’s perspective. The worry is that a user might mistakenly come to believe that they know what it is like to be a member of the marginalized group through the use of virtual reality. I argue that this is a possibility, but that Horn already has the starting point for a solution to the problem. I provide suggestions of how this starting point might be further developed.