Machine makes people more empathic

There's the old saying that if you want to understand someone, you should walk a mile in their shoes. But what if you could walk in their actual body? Thanks to virtual reality headsets, this is now - at least virtually - possible. And by fooling people into thinking they have a child's body, or one belonging to someone of a different skin colour, Mel Slater and his colleagues in Barcelona discovered, as he explained to Kat Arney, that this changes their behaviour too... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists