Through Pink and Blue glasses: designing a dispositional empathy game using gender stereotypes and Virtual Reality

Society is affected by gender stereotypes and a decrease of dispositional empathy (empathy as a stable character trait). We believe there is an overall lack of awareness how gender stereotypes affect us as individuals, both male and female, and our society as a whole. This paper reports on the opportunities of combining the concepts of Virtual Reality empathy games and sexism to stimulate the development of dispositional empathy and increase awareness about sexism in general. The evaluation shows that Through Pink and Blue Glasses stimulated dispositional empathy (empathy as a character trait). The results show that the experience triggered perspective-taking and the participants' willingness to act in real situations where normally ignorance occurs. This research extends our knowledge of developing games for dispositional empathy and lists design decisions that turned out to be efficient, which can be used for the development of other empathy games.