PONE-D-21-31505The use of virtual reality in studying prejudice and its reduction: a systematic reviewPLOS ONE

Dear Dr. Tassinari,

Thank you for submitting your manuscript to PLOS ONE. After careful consideration, we feel that it has merit but does not fully meet PLOS ONE’s publication criteria as it currently stands. Therefore, we invite you to submit a revised version of the manuscript that addresses the points raised during the review process.

Please submit your revised manuscript by Jan 19 2022 11:59PM. If you will need more time than this to complete your revisions, please reply to this message or contact the journal office at plosone@plos.org. When you're ready to submit your revision, log on to https://www.editorialmanager.com/pone/ and select the 'Submissions Needing Revision' folder to locate your manuscript file.

Please include the following items when submitting your revised manuscript:

• A rebuttal letter that responds to each point raised by the academic editor and reviewer(s). You should upload this letter as a separate file labeled 'Response to Reviewers'.
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If you would like to make changes to your financial disclosure, please include your updated statement in your cover letter. Guidelines for resubmitting your figure files are available below the reviewer comments at the end of this letter.

If applicable, we recommend that you deposit your laboratory protocols in protocols.io to enhance the reproducibility of your results. Protocols.io assigns your protocol its own identifier (DOI) so that it can be cited independently in the future. For instructions see: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/submission-guidelines#loc-laboratory-protocols. Additionally, PLOS ONE offers an option for publishing peer-reviewed Lab Protocol articles, which describe protocols hosted on protocols.io. Read more information on sharing protocols at https://plos.org/protocols?utm_medium=editorial-email&utm_source=authorletters&utm_campaign=protocols.

We look forward to receiving your revised manuscript.

Kind regards,

Michelangelo Vianello, Ph.D.

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

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Additional Editor Comments:

Dear Author,

Thank you for submitting your revised manuscript to PLOS ONE.

I have now received two independent reviews who are quite consistent regarding what should be fixed before publishing the manuscript. The two reviews are clear, and I agree with all comments and suggestions. I do think that you can effectively and thoroughly address all issues in a revision, so I invite you to submit a revised version of the manuscript. Please include both a clean version of the revised manuscript and a track changes version during the next submission. Also include a cover letter. If you wish to write a rebuttal for some of the reviewers’ suggestions rather than revising the manuscript, please add them in the cover letter.

After reading the reviews and the manuscript, I would like to focus the authors on three important issues that needs improvement.

Research Question.

R1 highlighted that the first part of the manuscript should be integrated with a summary of the social cognition literature on the malleability of attitudes and stereotypes. The authors will realize that doing this will also help contextualizing the role of emotion valence in the moderation of the direction of change after contact. Also, adding a good background will help identifying important questions in the literature that this systematic review might help to answer. Indeed, I would like to specifically focus the authors on this point: rather than answering a generic like “Is VR effective in changing implicit and explicit attitudes and stereotypes?”, more specific and more useful questions could be answered with this review. For instance: Under which conditions virtual contact leads to changes in implicit and explicit attitudes and stereotypes? Is the effect of real vs virtual contact the same? Do automatic attitude, prejudice or stereotype change less than their explicit counterparts? Answering specific, narrow and theoretically important questions like these is the final goal of a systematic review.

All relevant studies located?

Both I and R1 have been very surprised that the query used to locate articles did not include the word “attitude”. I think this should be fixed because neglecting all studies that investigated the effect of virtual contact on attitude rather than prejudice introduces a strong bias.

Quality of research systematically appraised.

R2 suggested that readers may not find what they look for. The core components of a systematic review as opposed to a classic -although thorough- narrative review may not be present in the current version of the manuscript. Narrative reviews are less useful for guiding policy or decision making. The style in which the results are summarized is indeed quite similar to that of narrative reviews, in which an expert opinion is discussed in terms of the existing literature. A systematic review should not only unbiasedly synthesize all studies on a specific research topic, but also critically evaluate them, and weight their informational value accordingly. For instance, the research question that leads this project is about effectiveness (does the intergroup contact created in VR reduce prejudice toward stigmatized groups?). As any other systematic review on effectiveness, randomized controlled trial are the golden rule. Other study designs should have less weight while summarizing the results. The categorization of studies according to their methodological soundness and related informational value should be crystal clear. For instance, the presence of random subject assignment, control groups, and other critical design issues such as type of contact (positive vs negative) or type of outcome (e.g., affective, cognitive, or behavioral components of attitudes) should be included in Table 1 and -above all- used by the authors to determine informational value of the studies while synthesizing the results. Hopefully, this may lead to a less ambiguous scenario than the current one in which basically every set of studies that lead to the same conclusion is contrasted with other studies that lead to different conclusions.

Minor

Plos One does not copyedit the manuscript before publication, so I do suggest getting the article revised by a native speaker. There are some typos that should be fixed (e.g. “methodical” in the abstract; “too” p. 16; “16” p. 17).

Yours sincerely,

Michelangelo Vianello

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Reviewers' comments:

Reviewer's Responses to Questions

Comments to the Author

1. Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions?

The manuscript must describe a technically sound piece of scientific research with data that supports the conclusions. Experiments must have been conducted rigorously, with appropriate controls, replication, and sample sizes. The conclusions must be drawn appropriately based on the data presented.

Reviewer #1: Partly

Reviewer #2: Partly

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2. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously?

Reviewer #1: N/A

Reviewer #2: N/A

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3. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available?

The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception (please refer to the Data Availability Statement in the manuscript PDF file). The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified.

Reviewer #1: No

Reviewer #2: Yes

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4. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English?

PLOS ONE does not copyedit accepted manuscripts, so the language in submitted articles must be clear, correct, and unambiguous. Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please note any specific errors here.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

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5. Review Comments to the Author

Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters)

Reviewer #1: Title: The use of virtual reality in studying prejudice and its reduction: a systematic review

The present review illustrates VR studies published to date on social attitudes and stereotyping with the goal of highlighting the contributions that VR techniques can offer in this field as well as the limitations of the current work.

The goal of this review is very interesting and timely since the use of VR techniques is rapidly growing in social psychology research. The VR techniques indeed represent a promising (but still under-investigated instrument) in social research concerning intergroup dynamics.

However, I have some reservations about the organization, rationale, and theoretical background of this review that prevent me from supporting its publication in the present form (see my comments/suggestions to authors).

Introduction:

Authors do not provide a background of the topic. This review is on social attitudes and stereotypes, and their malleability. I'm actually quite surprised to see that the reference list includes only a few studies from a Social Psychology or Social Cognition journal, despite the fact that this field has been studying the topic for several decades. I'm not trying to be a gatekeeper here as I recognize that many fields beyond Social Psychology/Cognition are interested in this topic. But you can't simply ignore 30+ years of scholarship. What do we know about social attitudes and stereotyping? How can we assess them? How do they operate? How can they be changed?

Similarly, I suggest introducing and describing some key concepts and terms that are essential to understand the topic (e.g., social groups, attitude, stereotype, intergroup relations, group membership, in-group and out-group members). As regards the terms included in the present version of the manuscript, I have some reservations about the use of the term “prejudice”. The term “prejudice” typically refers to negative evaluations that may be preconceived and consciously experienced. The studies reported in this review included beliefs (stereotypes) and evaluations with some degree of favor or disfavor (attitudes) about social groups assessed by using different paradigms (e.g., explicit and implicit measures). I would suggest the authors to substitute the term “prejudice” with the terms attitudes and stereotypes.

In addition, I suggest the authors to better highlight the motivation for using VR in this field. Over the past decades, several studies have attempted to develop interventions (e.g., see Dasgupta and Greenwald, 2001; Dasgupta, DeSteno, Williams, & Hunsinger, 2009; Legault, Gutsell, & Inzlicht, 2011; Mann & Kawakami, 2012; Lai et al. 2014, 2016) or used specific techniques (e.g., Marini et al. 2018) to produce changes in attitudes and stereotypes. How VR can help us to understand social interactions? Surely there is a valid motivation for doing this, right? What important gap in the social attitudes and stereotypes literature does this project fill? By providing the relevant literature on this topic, you might specify this gap to the readers in order to understand the potential and (maybe) unique contribution that VR can provide.

Results:

Authors illustrate the contribution of VR by considering the type of contact, stigma, presence of mediators, and moderators in the different studies. I think that authors should also create a section in which they compare the results found using implicit and explicit measures of attitudes/stereotypes or other instruments to assess relevant psychological constructs (e.g., empathy) in social relationships. It is important for the readers to be able here to identify the results obtained using different outcome measures. At the moment, these results are not clearly presented in the manuscript.

Conclusion and Discussion:

Please clarify also the effects of VR based on the outcome measures used in the study. What are the conclusions about implicit measures? What are the conclusions about explicit measures? What about the other paradigms used in these studies?

Minor points:

- Page numbers are missing.

- Please provide a description of the experimental paradigms mentioned in the text (e.g., shooting paradigm, Implicit Association Test).

- Please provide also in the main manuscript the main terms of research used in this review. I think that would have been appropriate include in your search also the term “attitude” and the most used instruments in this field (e.g., Implicit Association Test).

- Page 19 (?): Please consider some additional studies about the relation between implicit-explicit measures (e.g., Nosek and Smyth, 2007; Nosek et al., 2007; Greenwald and Nosek, 2008; Cunningham et al. 2004)

- Page 21(?): “Nevertheless, some contrasting evidence shows that embodying black avatars can

also lead to worsened implicit attitudes, depending on the social context in which the experience takes place (Banakou et al., 2020)”

Can you clarify this claim in the text? Which social contexts were examined in this study? Which social context worsened implicit attitudes?

Reviewer #2: Let me begin by saying that I learned something from reading this manuscript and I don’t have a lot to criticize. My summary is simple (though I’ll elaborate): I’m not certain that this is an area of investigation that is ready yet for a meta-analysis. In brief, the manuscript reads more like a very thorough Introduction than a meta-analysis. Often times, small groupings of results are pitted against one another such as in the following section (p. 19): “Similar encouraging results have been found when measuring explicit attitudes, as shown by Christofi et al. (2020) and Tong et al. (2020, 2017). However, other studies contest these findings by showing that intergroup contact experienced from the minority perspective doesn’t necessarily have any effect on intergroup attitudes (see Hasler et al., 2016; Oh et al., 2016; Starr et al., 2019).” This, to me, reads like an Introduction wherein the author(s) would include their preferred interpretation as well as a “but see” section of the citation. That said, Section 4.3 (Methodological issue and advantages) begins to outline what remains to be done. In so doing, this manuscript could serve well as a summary of the state of the field as well as an initial attempt at setting up the next couple of years of research. The quibble that the outline may be premature by those couple of years is obviously based on a somewhat arbitrary decision (i.e., exactly how many studies are needed before we are ready for a meta-analysis?). In the end, I found this manuscript more useful in terms of how it highlights what hasn’t been done. That is, of course, somewhat atypical for, as the title implies, a “systematic review”. As a reader, I might feel as though I had not gotten what I came for. I wonder if a change in title might be in order. Something like “a systematic review of the early research returns and an outline for the near future”. Something that both conveys that 1) there is not a lot of research completed yet (and so the conclusions will be relatively few and tenuous) and 2) the reader will get an organized view of what needs to happen next. To that end, I think the authors could spend a bit of time focusing current section 4.3 toward future directions and adding a bit more about what is needed. In that way, in my opinion, this would become something that anyone interested in entering into this subarea should read.

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6. PLOS authors have the option to publish the peer review history of their article (what does this mean?). If published, this will include your full peer review and any attached files.

If you choose “no”, your identity will remain anonymous but your review may still be made public.

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Reviewer #1: No

Reviewer #2: No

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PONE-D-21-31505R1The use of virtual reality in studying prejudice and its reduction: a systematic reviewPLOS ONE

Dear Dr. Tassinari,

I have received two reviews of your revised manuscript that are quite contrasting. Reviewer 2 is satisfied by your revisions and suggests publication. Reviewer 1 agrees that your revisions improved the manuscript but believes that they are not sufficient to support publication and suggests rejection.

I realize that a lot of work has gone into this manuscript during the review process. Hence, I offer you the chance of providing a second revision. I carefully read the revised manuscript, and I think that suggestions made by reviewer 1 were quite easy to address. You did not write a rebuttal to R1 suggestions made in the previous round of revisions. Instead, you explicitly agreed with them. So I guess that they are not included in the revisions due to a misunderstanding.

To clarify: R1 and/or I suggested to:

1. Add one or two paragraphs summarizing the 30+ years of research in social psychology on the malleability of attitudes and stereotypes. The summary should not be exhaustive. Yet, it should give readers a view of the great amount of research that has been conducted, framing intergroup contact into a larger set of interventions that have been extensively studied. Intergroup contact is should be presented as one of these interventions, not even the most effective (Lai et al. 2014; Lai et al. 2016).
2. Disaggregate both the literature review in (see previous point) and your results by outcome measure: implicit and explicit attitudes were shown to be differently malleable. Also discuss later in the manuscript the implicit/explicit distinction as a moderator.

Minor

1. Some typos still need to be fixed (e.g. “methodical” in the abstract). This issue was found in the previous version as well.
2. p. 5: it may be that the reader would understand that neuroimaging is subtly proposed as a more reliable substitute of indirect measures. This approach is even more evident in the discussion (p. 32). I do think that this should be avoided because most if not all experts in the field would not agree with that. These measures avoid self-reports, but this is probably everything they have in common. Also, there is no evidence at all that one is more reliable than the other. There is a famous paper by Bennett et al. (2009) in which the authors observed cerebral activity in a dead salmon…   
3. fix the citation for the IAT.
4. I typically refrain from this kind of suggestions, but I do think that omitting Bar-Anan & Vianello (2018) when citing Schimmack (2019) and the debate on the distinction between implicit and explicit constructs would seriously misrepresent the available empirical evidence on this topic.

Please submit your revised manuscript by May 23 2022 11:59PM. If you will need more time than this to complete your revisions, please reply to this message or contact the journal office at plosone@plos.org. When you're ready to submit your revision, log on to https://www.editorialmanager.com/pone/ and select the 'Submissions Needing Revision' folder to locate your manuscript file.

Please include the following items when submitting your revised manuscript:

• A rebuttal letter that responds to each point raised by the academic editor and reviewer(s). You should upload this letter as a separate file labeled 'Response to Reviewers'.
• A marked-up copy of your manuscript that highlights changes made to the original version. You should upload this as a separate file labeled 'Revised Manuscript with Track Changes'.
• An unmarked version of your revised paper without tracked changes. You should upload this as a separate file labeled 'Manuscript'.

If you would like to make changes to your financial disclosure, please include your updated statement in your cover letter. Guidelines for resubmitting your figure files are available below the reviewer comments at the end of this letter.

If applicable, we recommend that you deposit your laboratory protocols in protocols.io to enhance the reproducibility of your results. Protocols.io assigns your protocol its own identifier (DOI) so that it can be cited independently in the future. For instructions see: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/submission-guidelines#loc-laboratory-protocols. Additionally, PLOS ONE offers an option for publishing peer-reviewed Lab Protocol articles, which describe protocols hosted on protocols.io. Read more information on sharing protocols at https://plos.org/protocols?utm_medium=editorial-email&utm_source=authorletters&utm_campaign=protocols.

We look forward to receiving your revised manuscript.

Kind regards,

Michelangelo Vianello, Ph.D.

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

Journal Requirements:

Please review your reference list to ensure that it is complete and correct. If you have cited papers that have been retracted, please include the rationale for doing so in the manuscript text, or remove these references and replace them with relevant current references. Any changes to the reference list should be mentioned in the rebuttal letter that accompanies your revised manuscript. If you need to cite a retracted article, indicate the article’s retracted status in the References list and also include a citation and full reference for the retraction notice.

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Reviewers' comments:

Reviewer's Responses to Questions

Comments to the Author

1. If the authors have adequately addressed your comments raised in a previous round of review and you feel that this manuscript is now acceptable for publication, you may indicate that here to bypass the “Comments to the Author” section, enter your conflict of interest statement in the “Confidential to Editor” section, and submit your "Accept" recommendation.

Reviewer #1: (No Response)

Reviewer #2: (No Response)

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2. Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions?

The manuscript must describe a technically sound piece of scientific research with data that supports the conclusions. Experiments must have been conducted rigorously, with appropriate controls, replication, and sample sizes. The conclusions must be drawn appropriately based on the data presented.

Reviewer #1: No

Reviewer #2: Yes

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3. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously?

Reviewer #1: N/A

Reviewer #2: Yes

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4. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available?

The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception (please refer to the Data Availability Statement in the manuscript PDF file). The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified.

Reviewer #1: (No Response)

Reviewer #2: Yes

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5. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English?

PLOS ONE does not copyedit accepted manuscripts, so the language in submitted articles must be clear, correct, and unambiguous. Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please note any specific errors here.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

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6. Review Comments to the Author

Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters)

Reviewer #1: I think the present version of the manuscript has improved compared to the previous one. However, I still have some concerns that prevent me from supporting its publication. Unfortunately, the authors did not fully address some crucial points raised in my previous review.

Here are some examples.

I suggested the authors to provide a background of the topic that can summarize what we know about the malleability of attitudes and stereotypes. This piece of information is still lacking in the text. In the revised manuscript, the authors only describe in more detail one kind of intervention developed to change social attitudes and stereotypes (i.e., intergroup contact). Again, you cannot ignore 30+ years of scholarship on this topic. Over the past decades, several studies have developed interventions to change attitudes and stereotypes (e.g., see Dasgupta and Greenwald, 2001; Dasgupta, DeSteno, Williams, & Hunsinger, 2009; Legault, Gutsell, & Inzlicht, 2011; Mann & Kawakami, 2012; Lai et al. 2014, 2016; Marini et al. 2018). One or two paragraphs on this topic are necessary for the readers to understand what we know in this field and how VR may be useful. By reading the introduction of this manuscript, it seems social psychologists used only interventions based on intergroup contact to modulate social attitudes and stereotypes. I know that intergroup contact was the most used intervention in the VR studies, but this does not imply that this intervention is the only one that can be implemented using VR or the only one that deserves to be described. On this latter point, please also consider some recent studies on implicit bias showing that intergroup contact and perspective-taking interventions are not the most effective interventions to modulate social attitudes and stereotypes (see, for example, Lai et al. 2014; Lai et al. 2016).

The readers deserve to know that, over the years, many experimental interventions have been developed in this research field. The background provided by the authors is too limited.

In addition, a crucial aspect that was not addressed is the effectiveness of VR on implicit and explicit measures. What do we know about that? Is VR more effective on the implicit or explicit bias? Are the results of the reviewed studies unclear on this topic? This issue is something that the authors need to raise in their review, considering that attitudes and stereotypes assessed by implicit measures have shown to predict behavior more accurately than explicit measures in some specific domains. This aspect is relevant because the final goal of reducing attitudes and stereotypes is to reduce their effect on behavior.

Again, I still have some concerns about using the term “prejudice” in this manuscript as it includes studies in which they used implicit measures as the IAT. I believe this term is not appropriate given the long debate in the literature about what implicit measures assess.

Finally, please report the correct references when you cite an instrument. The appropriate citation for the IAT is not Greenwald & Banaji (1995) but Greenwald, McGhee, and Schwartz (1998).

Reviewer #2: I read the revised manuscript with interest and pleasure. I feel as though the review process made this paper quite a bit stronger. Particularly as a result of the authors’ openness to doing a lot of additional work in response to reviewer requests. And, as the authors note in their response to the reviews, the current version is also strengthened by the number of additional papers that could now be included – the number of which serves to indicate how important the topic is. This is a paper that I will send to my students as a way to understand the state of a topic. That’s a rather self-centered compliment, but it’s the best way I know to indicate a paper’s potential utility.

I note that it will be worthwhile to do one more very slow read through for typos and things related to some annoying idiosyncrasies of the English language, particularly related to verb tenses and singular vs. plural formations.

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7. PLOS authors have the option to publish the peer review history of their article (what does this mean?). If published, this will include your full peer review and any attached files.

If you choose “no”, your identity will remain anonymous but your review may still be made public.

Do you want your identity to be public for this peer review? For information about this choice, including consent withdrawal, please see our Privacy Policy.

Reviewer #1: No

Reviewer #2: No

[NOTE: If reviewer comments were submitted as an attachment file, they will be attached to this email and accessible via the submission site. Please log into your account, locate the manuscript record, and check for the action link "View Attachments". If this link does not appear, there are no attachment files.]

While revising your submission, please upload your figure files to the Preflight Analysis and Conversion Engine (PACE) digital diagnostic tool, https://pacev2.apexcovantage.com/. PACE helps ensure that figures meet PLOS requirements. To use PACE, you must first register as a user. Registration is free. Then, login and navigate to the UPLOAD tab, where you will find detailed instructions on how to use the tool. If you encounter any issues or have any questions when using PACE, please email PLOS at figures@plos.org. Please note that Supporting Information files do not need this step.

The use of virtual reality in studying prejudice and its reduction: a systematic review

PONE-D-21-31505R2

Dear Dr. Tassinari,

We’re pleased to inform you that your manuscript has been judged scientifically suitable for publication and will be formally accepted for publication once it meets all outstanding technical requirements.

Within one week, you’ll receive an e-mail detailing the required amendments. When these have been addressed, you’ll receive a formal acceptance letter and your manuscript will be scheduled for publication.

An invoice for payment will follow shortly after the formal acceptance. To ensure an efficient process, please log into Editorial Manager at http://www.editorialmanager.com/pone/, click the 'Update My Information' link at the top of the page, and double check that your user information is up-to-date. If you have any billing related questions, please contact our Author Billing department directly at authorbilling@plos.org.

If your institution or institutions have a press office, please notify them about your upcoming paper to help maximize its impact. If they’ll be preparing press materials, please inform our press team as soon as possible -- no later than 48 hours after receiving the formal acceptance. Your manuscript will remain under strict press embargo until 2 pm Eastern Time on the date of publication. For more information, please contact onepress@plos.org.

Kind regards,

Michelangelo Vianello, Ph.D.

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE