ArticleiScience2025
Confusing virtual reality with reality - An experimental study.
Article in iScience, 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 2 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
2 citing papers in PubMed.
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Virtual reality's (VR) ability to create convincing illusions of presence makes it a powerful media for therapeutic and prosocial applications. Correspondingly, it also presents ethical challenges as the line between the real and virtual blurs, the focus of our study. Forty-nine participants interacted with a virtual experimenter that invited participants to sit on a chair, with 20% doing so without checking for a real chair. The virtual experimenter had also placed a tablet in a drawer, and a week later, in the corresponding real room, 45% of participants expected a tablet to be in the same place. Additionally, implicit attitudes were influenced based on subtle differences in wording of interview questions asked by the virtual experimenter. A Bayesian analysis supported these findings. Hence, participants may take virtual objects as real, risking their safety, or may inappropriately apply observations in VR to real-life problem solving, resulting in vulnerability to deception.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.