Templeton Grant: Teaching Empathy & Compassion with VR Games
Awarded a $233,918 research grant (2020 - 2025) from the Templeton World Charity Foundation to serve as Principal Investigator for the project: "Teaching Empathy and Compassion through Virtual Reality Games".
This significant grant supports a multi-year intervention and research initiative exploring the use of virtual reality games to foster empathy and compassion. The study involves 703 adolescents across four secondary schools in Lagos, Nigeria, and Kenya.
The project investigates the effectiveness of VR game-based interventions designed to cultivate perspective-taking, emotional understanding, and prosocial behaviors within this demographic. It leverages insights from positive psychology, game design, and developmental science.
A key finding from the research is that third-person observation in VR outperformed first-person embodiment for developing empathy and compassion—a result that challenges the common assumption that deeper immersion always produces greater empathic response. Together with the related Meta-funded study, this programme represents the largest VR empathy intervention research conducted with adolescents in Africa, involving over 1,080 participants across two countries and multiple ethnic groups.
Outputs from the project include a publication in Research in Human Development (2025) on VR game jams as character development tools, and a paper accepted at the IEEE Conference on Virtual Reality and 3D User Interfaces (IEEE VR 2026) reporting the cross-national trial results.
The funding enables comprehensive data collection, program implementation, and collaboration with local schools and communities. The findings are expected to provide valuable evidence on the effectiveness and scalability of using VR games to cultivate empathy and compassion among adolescents in diverse cultural contexts.