Weekly Research Seminar Series - A Virtual Reality Technique to Enhance Helping Behaviour of Police Toward a Victim of Police Racial Aggression

This week, we are delighted to have our colleague,  Dr. Sameer Kishore for our Wednesday research seminar. Sameer will be presenting his collaborative research on 'A Virtual Reality Technique to Enhance Helping Behaviour of Police Toward a Victim of Police Racial Aggression'. This project was carried out with Google (Jigsaw) where the team investigated the use of VR as a platform for encouraging helpful behaviour among US police officers towards victims of police racial aggression.

Wednesday Research Seminar Series               

We are pleased to invite you to our Wednesday Research Seminar. It will be held online on 16 February from 4pm via Microsoft team platform. Wednesday Research Seminar Series was launched in 2008 and has featured more than 310 presentations to date. The seminars provide a forum for researchers to share their work. Presenters include faculty from Middlesex University Dubai and other universities in the United Arab Emirates, as well as researchers from other global institutions. Dr. Sameer will deliver seminar on:       

“A Virtual Reality Technique to Enhance Helping Behaviour of Police Toward a Victim of Police Racial Aggression”   

Sameer Kishore

Abstract       

There is an alarming level of violence by police in the US toward African Americans. Although this may be rooted in explicit racial bias, the more intractable problem is overcoming implicit bias, bias that is non-conscious but demonstrated in actual behaviour. If bias is implicit, it is difficult to change through explicit methods that attempt to change attitudes. We carried out a study using virtual reality (VR) with 38 officers in a US police department, who took part in an interrogation of an African American suspect alongside an officer who was racially abusive toward the suspect. Seventeen of the participants witnessed the interview again from a third person perspective (Observer) and 21 from the embodied perspective of the suspect, now a victim of the interrogation (Victim condition), having been assigned randomly to these two groups. Some weeks later, all witnessed aggression by an officer toward an African American man in a virtual cafe scenario. The results show that the actions of those who had been in the Victim condition were coded as being more helpful toward the victim than those in the Observer condition. We argue that such VR exposures operate at the experiential and implicit level rather than the explicit, and hence are more likely to be effective in combating aggression rooted in implicit bias.

Biography    

Dr. Sameer Kishore is a senior lecturer and the head and founder of the Immersive VR Lab at Middlesex University Dubai. His main research interests deal with investigating the behavioural, attitudinal, and implicit effects of having an illusion of body ownership over a virtual or robotic body that’s different from one’s own. Prior to joining the University, he was the Head of Medical Rehabilitation and VR Innovation at Virtual Bodyworks, Barcelona, where he was involved in developing commercial VR applications for tackling personal and societal issues, such as domestic violence and treatment of phobias. As part of his research, he has worked with state-of-the-art technological systems and carried out several studies, which have been published in prestigious peer-reviewed journals and conferences such as The Lancet Psychiatry, IEEE Computer Graphics & Applications and the ACM Symposium on Virtual Reality Software and Technology. His work has received widespread media coverage, including the BBC, The New Yorker, and The Guardian. Dr. Kishore has a master’s degree in computer graphics and computer vision from University College London, UK, and a bachelor’s degree in computer science engineering from Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Dubai.

Look forward to seeing you at the seminar!