Sun Joo (Grace) Ahn has observed these behavioral changes first hand. In 2011, then a graduate student in Bailenson’s lab, Ahn sent study participants a questionnaire to determine how likely they were to understand the perspective of others. Two days later, the participants were provided with basic information about red-green colorblindness — a visual disorder that causes difficulty distinguishing between certain hues — and asked to verbally guide a person they believed to be colorblind through a series of virtual reality color-matching exercises.

Some participants viewed the exercises through a filter that simulated colorblindness, while others completed the exercises without the filter. Ahn found that after seeing the world through a colorblind lens, study subjects who originally weren’t as likely to understand the perspective of others showed more favorable attitudes towards colorblind people a full day after the exercise had ended. That attitude also translated into action. A separate experiment that asked study subjects to help a student group attempting to build colorblind-friendly websites showed that participants who experienced virtual colorblindness themselves, even for just a few minutes, spent about twice as long helping, compared to participants in the control group.