Can New Technologies Make Us More Human? An Inquiry on VR Technologies in Social Cognition

摘要

There is a heavily ingrained image in contemporary culture, that new technologies can have a negative impact on human relations and bring us closer to dehumanization. For example the immersive worlds of games, virtual reality and social media, provide a surrogate of human relationships and interactions. Despite these dangers, we believe that new technologies can also make us more empathetic, altruistic and understanding toward each other. So we ask a question: can new, emerging technologies make us more human and become a factor in the process of humanization? In this article we present an idea that is a positive answer to this question, which could be called digital humanism. According to our thesis, new technologies extend and develop new tools of social cognition, especially when we consider the possibility to take perspectives of others that without the aid of said technologies would be impossible to comprehend. We can experience in first person, via VR technologies, how one suffers from various cognitive disorders and deficits like the ones associated with attention, autism, MCI (mild cognitive disorder), schizophrenia or color blindness. This refers to “digital” part of our thesis. The aforementioned experiences can influence, mainly through understanding and empathy, our moral actions and can overcome various biases like harmful stereotypes (Yee and Bailenson, 2006) or enhance altruistic attitudes in social cognition. At the same time it creates conditions for the formulation of new social relations (Bailenson, 2006; Bailenson et al., 2008). This refers to “humanism” in our thesis.