Age-bending VR unlocks hope for the future

Throughout history, young people have battled against the status quo to drive all kinds of important social changes. They are often cast as the key to resolving some of the world's longest-running conflicts — if only older people would get out of their way. 

A new paper in Scientific Reports suggests that this might not be the case. Studies led by Beatrice S. Hasler at Israel's Reichman University found that younger generations actually had less hope for peace and were less conciliatory than older generations. Rather than being the route out of long-term conflicts, younger people seem to be perpetuating them. However, the team also identified a method to address this: using VR to 'put' young people into the bodies of old people. 

In the first of six studies, Hasler and her colleagues analysed data from opinion surveys completed by more than 100,000 Israeli Jews between 1994 and 2017. These surveys assessed perceptions of the probability of peace in the ongoing Israel–Palestinian conflict. The team found that levels of hope generally decreased over time — but they also found a stronger decline in hope among the younger generations. 

A second study on 209 Israeli Jews expanded on these findings, investigating whether younger people are just less hopeful or optimistic about the future in general. Analyses revealed that this was not the case, however. Compared with older people, they were less hopeful specifically about the prospects of peace. 

In the third study, 174 Palestinian citizens of Israel and 984 Jewish Israelis completed assessments of their conciliatory attitudes as well as hope for peace. The team found that older Palestinians, like older Israelis, were more hopeful than younger people about the chances of peace. This analysis also revealed that less hope for peace led to less conciliatory attitudes. 

"The findings of first three studies indicate that age is associated with emotions and attitudes that are crucial for the resolution of long-term conflicts," the team writes. To explore whether this link does indeed apply more widely, they turned their attention to the decades-long conflict between Turkish and Greek Cypriots. 

This dispute has some key differences to the one between Israel and Palestine; for example, it has not been violent for more than 25 years. However, responses from more than 1,000 Greek and Turkish Cypriots showed that the older the person was, the more they believed in the possibility of peace. Again, greater hope for peace was linked to more conciliatory attitudes toward the other side. 

There are a few potential reasons why older people might feel more hopeful than younger people about the chances for peace. Older people have a broader perspective on the conflict, the team notes. Having lived through years of fluctuations in tensions and hopes, this ebb and flow might encourage them to believe that peace is possible. The researchers also point to work finding a negativity bias in youth, with younger people paying more attention to and remembering more negative than positive events. According to one theory, people become more motivated to shift their motivations towards positive experiences with age. Research suggests that older individuals also rate future events more positively than younger people do. 

This led the team to wonder if a VR 'ageing' technique might encourage younger people to feel more like older people do. A total of 69 Jewish Israelis in their mid-twenties wore a VR headset that gave them the illusion that they were in a gender-matched virtual body of an 80-year-old, or a 25-year-old, as a control. The researchers found that those 'in' the 80-year-old body were more hopeful about the prospect of peace than those in the 25-year-old body, though there was no difference between the two groups in general hopes about the future. 

A final VR study on a fresh group of 81 young Jewish Israeli participants found that those put into the 80-year-old body gave more detailed descriptions of anticipated positive collective future events. This clearer positive vision for the future was linked to a stronger belief that these events would in fact occur, which in turn was linked to greater hope for peace.  

With younger generations less hopeful about peace and less conciliatory than their older peers, finding interventions to change this will be vital to bringing about positive change, the team argues. VR "bears great potential as a novel peace-building tool," they argue. It "may be an effective means to break that pattern that contributes to the perpetuation of long-term conflicts and pave the way toward their peaceful resolution." The practicalities of how this tool may be implemented, however, remain open for further research.

Read the paper in full: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-023-31667-9