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Five canonical findings from 30 years of psychological experimentation in virtual reality

Nature Human Behaviour volume 9, pages 1328–1338 (2025)Cite this article

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Abstract

Virtual reality (VR) is an emerging medium used in work, play and learning. We review experimental research in VR spanning three decades of scholarship. Instead of exhaustively representing the landscape, our unique contribution is providing in-depth reviews of canonical psychological findings balanced across various domains within psychology. We focus on five findings: the benefit of being there depends on the activity; self-avatars influence behaviour; procedural training works better than abstract learning; body tracking makes VR unique; and people underestimate distance in VR. These findings are particularly useful to social scientists who are new to VR as a medium, or those who have studied VR but have focused on specific psychological subfields (for example, social, cognitive or perceptual psychology). We discuss the relevance for researchers and media consumers and suggest future areas for human behaviour research.

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Fig. 1: A timeline of selected influential research events.
Fig. 2: Publications over time.

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Acknowledgements

We thank the incredible panel of scholars who helped make this work possible with their insights and the time they put into phone calls and emails as we refined the list of five findings and selected events for the timeline shown in Fig. 1. In alphabetical order, the panel comprises S. J. Ahn, J. Bailey, G. Bruder, M. Miller, T. Peck, S. Persky, S. Rizzo, A. Steed, A. Stevenson Won, B. Weiderhold and G. Welch. The panel members bear no responsibility for any specific choices in the paper; instead, they were a source of brainstorming and information. Moreover, we thank J. Hancock, R. Ratan and P. Rosedale for helpful discussions and feedback on early drafts.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Communication, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA

    Jeremy N. Bailenson, Cyan DeVeaux, Eugy Han, Monique Santoso & Portia Wang

  2. Department of Communication, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI, USA

    David M. Markowitz

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  1. Jeremy N. Bailenson
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Authorship is alphabetical by last name. All authors contributed to conceptualization, original draft writing, visualization and editing. All authors read and agreed to the final version of this manuscript.

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Correspondence to Jeremy N. Bailenson.

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Bailenson, J.N., DeVeaux, C., Han, E. et al. Five canonical findings from 30 years of psychological experimentation in virtual reality. Nat Hum Behav 9, 1328–1338 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-025-02216-3

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