Y: What’s that over your eyes, Don?
D: Hold on a second, this roller coaster’s about to go down its final drop.
Y: What roller coaster? Oh, that’s a VR headset over your eyes, isn’t it?
D: Whee! Okay, back to the real world. Though I have to say, that ride felt really realistic.
Y: Still, I don’t think it’ll ever mimic real life completely. And maybe that’s our fault— there’s a big gap between how we act in virtual reality and how we act in real life, as scientists who did an experiment focused on yawning found out.
In real life, when we see someone yawn, we reflexively yawn too—it’s called contagious yawning. But when we feel like we’re being watched, we suppress that instinct, or at least resist it, maybe because some people consider yawning rude.
Researchers first wanted to see whether contagious yawning still worked in a virtual environment. It does: subjects wearing VR headsets who watched someone yawn in a virtual environment had similar rates of contagious yawning as people do in real life.
Then, researchers added a virtual person to the virtual environment to test whether this social pressure would make the subjects resist the urge to yawn. Interestingly, it didn’t. But then researchers introduced an actual person into the room. Even though the subjects couldn’t see or hear the person because they were wearing their headsets and were immersed in the virtual world, just knowing that a real person was there made them start suppressing their yawning.
D: I wonder if I behave any differently on real roller coasters. Maybe I should take the rest of the day off to find out…