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Vol.13, No.2, 2023 1717 

 

 

 

 

Can Virtual Reality Elicit More Empathy: 

A Meta-analysis Based on 19 Randomized 

Controlled Trials 

By Wang, H. & Tang, A. M. 
Correspondence to: Aimin Tang, Qufu Normal University, China. E-mail: 

tam6706@126.com  

MPATHY is an individual’s objective and insightful awareness of the 

feelings and behavior of others. There are mainly two types of empathy: 

cognitive and affective. Empathy plays a crucial role in improving student 

academic performance as well as in promoting social interaction of the indi-

vidual. Virtual reality is generally defined as a medium technology which 

can provide simulative experiences in a computer-created environment and 

has the capacity to enhance human empathy by offering immersive learning 

experiences. This study conducted a meta-analysis to evaluate the effects of 

virtual reality-assisted instruction on eliciting empathy in students and to dis-

cern the influences of various variables on student empathetic behavior. The 

following two questions were proposed: Is virtual reality-assisted instruction 

more effective in enhancing student empathy than traditional teaching meth-

ods? How are research design, subject matter and process features related to 

the promotive effects of virtual reality on student empathetic competence? 

Literature inclusion criteria were established according to the princi-

ples of PICOS, including (1) students as subjects; (2) virtual reality-based in-

struction as the intervention measure; (3) traditional teaching modes (such as 

classroom instruction, internship, and screen videos) as control measures; (4) 

scores from the Empathy Scale serving as outcome indicators (data to be pre-

sented as mean values and standard deviations or convertible into mean val-

ues and standard deviations); (5) valid and reliable measurement tools; (6) 

randomized controlled trials as research design. Exclusion criteria included: 

sample size less than 10; incomplete data or unconvertible data; articles pub-

lished in languages other than Chinese or English; full text inaccessible. This 

meta-analysis included 19 studies all conducted by randomized controlled 

trials, with a sample of 1949 subjects consisting of 1066 in the experimental 

group and 883 in the control group. All articles were published after 2010, 

and 11 of them were published after 2020, accounting for 57.89%. 

The analytical results demonstrate that virtual reality-assisted educa-

tion can more effectively enhance students’ empathy than traditional teach-

ing techniques; that virtual reality-based instruction has a better effect on 

E 

mailto:tam6706@126.com


 

Vol.13, No.2, 2023 1718 

eliciting empathy in students than face-to-face teaching, yet there is no sig-

nificant difference in teaching outcomes between virtual reality-enabled in-

struction and 2D/3D video-based teaching; in knowledge learning and public 

good-related experiences, virtual reality-based education poses significant 

positive effects on triggering empathy in students, with a stronger effect in 

the former, whilst it has no prominent empathy-eliciting effect in the teach-

ing of disease diagnoses, compared with traditional teaching methods; 10-20 

minutes of virtual reality-assisted instruction is the most effective amount for 

inducing empathy in students. 

 

 

Source: Open Education Research, 2023; 29(1):60-69. 


