leading-edge research lab at Stanford University has dedicated the past ten years to investigating this question. The Virtual Human Interaction Lab (VHIL), founded and directed by cognitive psychologist Dr. Jeremy Bailenson, specializes in research on how virtual reality experiences can change our real-life attitudes and behaviors for the better. Through dozens of ingenious experiments, they’ve discovered that just a few minutes in the right virtual environment can increase our willpower and compassion, changing how we think and act for the next twenty-four hours or even the next week.
Here are a few of their most intriguing findings.
Want to exercise more, but can’t quite seem to summon up the willpower? There may be a gameful way to trick your brain into moving your body. It’s called vicarious exercise. All you have to do is watch a video game doppelgänger, or an avatar designed to look just like you, exercising in the virtual world.
It’s true. You can build exercise-related self-efficacy without doing a single push-up or taking a single step. You just need to spend a few minutes watching your avatar do all the hard work.
In a study conducted by the VHIL, researchers found that participants who watched their virtual doppelgängers running on a treadmill reported feeling significantly higher confidence that they could exercise effectively. More important, after they left the lab, they exercised a full hour more than participants who watched their virtual doppelgänger stand around doing nothing. Over the next twenty-four hours, the participants with running avatars walked more city blocks, climbed more stairs, and spent more time in the gym.21
However, this technique worked only when the avatars were specially created to look like the participants. Watching a generic male or female avatar exercise had zero effect on participants’ real-life movement.
Can seeing a virtual version of yourself succeed trick your brain into believing you’ve actually done it yourself? This study suggests it can, and that it’s an effective shortcut to boost self-efficacy. The Stanford researchers theorize that the virtual doppelgängers create a “mirror neuron effect.”22 (As you’ll recall from Chapter 2, our mirror neurons mimic the neural activity of people around us, particularly when we are doing the same activity or feel closely connected to them.) Because participants felt more closely connected to avatars that looked just like them, the mirror neuron effect was stronger. It’s quite an astonishing finding—we can create mirror neurons not just with other people but with virtual people as well!
On the heels of this promising study, the same lab decided to try to create an even more effective exercise booster. They kept the virtual doppelgängers and added a new, interactive element. This time participants were asked to lift weights while observing their avatars. Every time they completed a successful lift in real life, their virtual avatar changed shape, appearing more muscular and fit. During mandated breaks in the participants’ exercise, however, the avatars changed shape again, becoming heavier and flabbier.
After just a few minutes of this interactive workout, participants were invited to stay for up to thirty minutes and continue their workout. Compared with a group that lifted weights without a virtual doppelgänger, they completed ten times as many exercises. Imagine if you could motivate yourself to do ten times as many push-ups, or climb ten times as many steps, every time you exercised—just by spending a few minutes working out with a virtual version of yourself!
Like many of the other studies we’ve looked at in this chapter, dopamine bursts seem to be a major factor in creating this positive change. Dr. Bailenson calls it the “instant gratification” of immediate virtual weight loss. “Working out with a virtual doppelgänger means you can see physical rewards of exercise right away,” he says, “which is something that doesn’t typically happen in the real world. In the real world, it takes days or weeks to notice any positive physical changes.” But game avatars that respond to physical activity right away can trigger dopamine boosts that trick the brain into feeling rewarded immediately. This process enables players to build self-efficacy much more quickly than in normal life. And greater self-efficacy, even if it’s from a virtual experience, leads to more real-world exercise, right away.
To confirm this surprising phenomenon, the Stanford researchers have conducted five different studies to date. They all show the same thing: vicarious exercise and vicarious weight loss significantly increase self-efficacy, and as a result, real-world exercise.23
So what does this mean for you, today? The VHIL virtual doppelgängers aren’t available to the public yet—although undoubtedly, vicarious exercise technology will become widespread in the future. In the meantime, this research should be a powerful reminder that self-efficacy, not motivation, is the key to building up your willpower and determination to do things that are difficult. If you need to boost your own self-efficacy without the help of virtual reality, focus on specific skills and abilities that you can increase, even if it’s only the tiniest bit each day. Run for one minute longer. Do one more push-up. Walk one more block. The key is to commit to a specific improvement at the start of each workout. Every time you set a slightly more challenging goal and successfully achieve it, you’ll activate the neural networks that support increased self-efficacy and determination.
If you want the full avatar experience, however, a simpler version of vicarious exercise may be available to you today. Meredith, forty, an elementary school teacher in Phoenix, Arizona, discovered this trick by accident when she started playing the computer game The Sims, a kind of computerized dollhouse in which you create custom avatars and help them achieve their career and family goals. “Not sure what to make of this,” she wrote me recently, “but my Sim seems to have inspired me to exercise and talk to my neighbors more.” It turns out that Meredith had created a Sim version of herself—same hair color, eye color, height, weight, and even fashion sense. And watching her virtual doppelgänger work out and socialize in the computer game triggered the motivation and self-efficacy to do it herself. “The instant results that my Sim gets when she works out or chats with neighbors is so satisfying!” she told me. “Seeing the immediate reward the avatar gets makes it look so easy.”
As in Dr. Bailenson’s lab, the instant gratification of virtual feedback seems to have triggered real-world self-confidence in Meredith. It also triggered a helpful awareness of priorities. “I think it’s the panel that shows the Sims’ needs that really inspired me,” she said, referring to the way Sims games keep score by reminding you that your Sim characters need things like exercise and social activity to be happy and healthy. “I started thinking of what my own panel would be like,” Meredith told me. “I realized I needed to spend more time doing the things that make me feel good. Funny how a computer game can teach you something important about yourself!”
We’ve looked so far in this chapter at heroic qualities like determination, grit, and perseverance. These character strengths help you overcome the kind of tough obstacles and achieve epic goals that can make you an inspiration to others. But there’s another kind of heroic quality that increased self-efficacy can provoke: altruistic qualities.
In another series of experiments at Dr. Bailenson’s Stanford University lab, participants were invited to learn how to “fly like Superman,” using a special virtual reality flying simulator.24 Players would fly through a city landscape, controlling their flight path through their own physical gestures. To give you an idea of what it might feel like to interact with this kind of simulator, here are the game play instructions given to the study participants:
Lift your hands over your head to take off. To land, drop your hands to your side. Where you point your hands is where you will fly. To move faster, move your hands together. To fly slower move your hands apart.
Players were instructed to search the city streets for a crying child. That child,
