Avatars

One of the important aspects of Virtual Reality is the Presence illusion, that makes users behave as they would do in reality. That creates the perfect base to be able to test theories on social behavior that would be impossible to replicate in real scenarios and so study areas such as bystander effects during tragic events or even obedience to authority paradigms.

A large review on the Virtual Reality Illusions and how they work can be found here:
Gonzalez-Franco, Mar, and Jaron Lanier. “Model of illusions and virtual reality.” Frontiers in psychology 8 (2017): 1125.

Model of Illusions and Virtual Reality

One example of our research in this field is the replication of the Milgram experiment inside VR.
Gonzalez-Franco, M., Slater, M., Birney, M. E., Swapp, D., Haslam, S. A., & Reicher, S. D. (2018). Participant concerns for the Learner in a Virtual Reality replication of the Milgram obedience study. PloS one, 13(12).

Participant concerns for the Learner in a Virtual Reality replication of the Milgram obedience study

The main learnings of this work was also published for the general in our Scientific American observation blog post:

Would You Give a Virtual Electric Shock to an Avatar?