Inside the headsets, participants were exposed to yawning while a virtual avatar kept watch. Source: Nicola Anderson/UBC

Researchers from UBC Research and State University of New York Polytechnic Institute have found that humans behave differently in a virtual reality (VR) environment than they do in real life.

VR is going to become commonplace in many industries sooner rather than later. VR is already being used to spot child abuse, treat dog bites, and fight addiction. Many psychologists and researchers are starting to wonder if people behave in a VR environment the same way that they do in real life. To test this, the research team studied how people react to yawning in real life versus in a VR environment.

When a person yawns, it is likely that the people around them will either yawn or have the urge to yawn. Even seeing a photo of a person yawning or reading the word yawn can make someone yawn. The clinical term for this phenomenon is contagious yawning. A social presence can deter contagious yawning. If a person feels they are being watched, it is likely that they will yawn less or stop themselves from yawning at all. The researchers focused on contagious yawning and the effect of social presence on yawning in VR environments.

During the study, participants wore VR headsets. While in the VR environment, participants were shown a person yawning. The first tests had no social presence and the second tests had a social presence in the form of a virtual human avatar or virtual webcam in the environment. The researchers studied if the participants yawned, how much they yawned and if they were influenced by social presence.

The results of the first tests showed that people had a 38% contagious yawning rate in the VR environment. This is on par with the real-life contagious yawning rate, which was already known to hover between 30 and 60%. But the second round of tests had a different result than expected. When a virtual social presence was introduced, it had no effect on the contagious yawning rate. The results from the second tests were the same as the first test. The team found that the participants were more affected by a researcher standing in the testing room than by the virtual social presence.

This study opens the door for more researchers to dive into human psychology and virtual reality. Humans don’t react the same way in a VR environment as they do in real life. If VR is going to become more common in our lives, what does this discovery mean for the future? The researchers also say that the study is important to remind researchers and psychologists to be aware of VR’s limitations when using it in future studies.

"Using VR to examine how people think and behave in real life may very well lead to conclusions that are fundamentally wrong. This has profound implications for people who hope to use VR to make accurate projections regarding future behaviors," said Alan Kingstone, a professor in UBC's department of psychology and the study's senior author, "For example, predicting how pedestrians will behave when walking amongst driverless cars, or the decisions that pilots will make in an emergency. Experiences in VR may be a poor proxy for real life."

The study was published in Scientific Reports.