ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Virtual Real.
Sec. Virtual Reality and Human Behaviour
This article is part of the Research TopicEmbodied interfaces: Human experience in virtual and mediated worldsView all 3 articles
Exploring the Role of Collective Psychological Ownership in Cooperative Virtual Intergroup Contact on Ethnic Prejudice
Provisionally accepted
- 1University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland
- 2Faculty of Medicine, University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, Modena, Italy, Modena / Reggio Emilia, Italy
- 3Department of Human Sciences, University of Verona, Verona, Italy
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Virtual reality (VR) offers unique opportunities for examining intergroup interactions. Even thoughVR-based intergroup contact has been seen as promising in reducing prejudice, researchers have faced significant challenges to deliver effective virtual contact interventions and called for better understanding of VR-specific identity-related processes that are present during and facilitate the social interactions in VR. This is a follow-up study on the virtual intergroup contact intervention conducted among 132 White Italian adult participants (blinded for peer review). The intervention failed to obtain virtual intergroup contact effects on explicit prejudice and showed only a marginal improvement in implicit intergroup bias towards people of African descent following cooperative intergroup contact with a Black avatar. Critical factors contributing to decreasing prejudice in VR were co-presence, body ownership and common cyber identity. In this follow-up study, we examine an additional mechanism that may influence intergroup outcomes in VR contact: the experience of Collective Psychological Ownership of a Virtual Space (CPO-VS). Particularly, we examine the effect of CPO-VS on explicit and implicit attitudes toward people of African ethnic descent following cooperative intergroup contact with an avatar representing a Black person. Results showed that higher perceived CPO-VS was associated with more favorable explicit attitudes toward outgroup members following VR experience across conditions, but it did not moderate the effect of contact on outgroup attitudes. These findings suggest that fostering collective psychological ownership in shared virtual spaces may improve intergroup relations.
Keywords: Collective psychological ownership, Intergroup attitudes, Intergroup Contact, Prejudice, virtual reality
Received: 03 Nov 2025; Accepted: 19 Dec 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Elovainio, Tassinari, Vezzali, Cocco and Jasinskaja-Lahti. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Reko Elovainio
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