Does feeling you have Einstein's body make you think better?
Young men who were given a virtual Einstein body showed less implicit bias against older people and, depending on their IQ and self-esteem, improved more on a planning task than men given an ordinary body.
Source
Virtually Being Einstein Results in an Improvement in Cognitive Task Performance and a Decrease in Age Bias
Study at a glance
- Design
- Human experiment — Two-group randomised between-subjects VR embodiment study (Einstein body vs same-age Normal body), with pre-tests one week before and post-tests right after exposure.
- N
- N=30 · 30 healthy young men, 15 per condition; one outlier later removed from the problem-solving analysis.
- Population
- Male university-area adults aged 18-30 in Barcelona
- Outcome
- Change in Tower of London problem-solving score and change in age-bias Implicit Association Test score
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What they did
Thirty young men were randomly assigned to wear a motion-tracked virtual body in VR that was either Albert Einstein or a young adult like themselves. A week before, and again right after a short VR session in which they moved and did a number-ordering task, they completed the Tower of London planning task and an age-bias Implicit Association Test. Baseline IQ (estimated from a word-reading test) and self-esteem were measured and entered as covariates in a Bayesian model.
What they found
Both groups reported strong ownership of and control over their virtual body. Implicit age bias dropped in the Einstein group but barely changed in the Normal group (a medium effect, Cohen's d = 0.54; posterior probability 0.932 that Einstein reduced bias). Planning-task improvement depended on baseline traits: in the Einstein group higher IQ went with more improvement, whereas in the Normal group it went with less, and the Einstein benefit was concentrated in participants with low self-esteem.
The limits
What it doesn't show
The sample was small, all male and young, so the findings may not generalise. Because the virtual body was both old and famous for intelligence, the study cannot say whether the effects came from age, from Einstein's reputation, or from simply being in an exciting, unusual body. The groups differed by chance on IQ and self-esteem, so the planning-task effect relies on model covariates and interactions rather than a simple group difference, and no asynchronous-movement control was run to isolate the role of body ownership.
Key terms
- Body ownership illusion
- The feeling that an artificial or virtual body is your own, created here by seeing it from a first-person view and having it move in sync with you.
- Implicit Association Test (IAT)
- A reaction-time task that infers automatic associations, such as linking old faces with negative words, from how quickly people sort paired categories.
- Tower of London task
- A puzzle in which beads must be moved to match a target arrangement in as few moves as possible, used to measure planning and executive functioning.
- Visuomotor synchrony
- When a seen body moves at the same time and in the same way as your own movements, which strengthens the sense that it is yours.
- Executive functioning
- Higher-level control processes such as planning, problem solving and flexible goal-directed behaviour.
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Quiz yourself
What was the independent variable in this experiment?
Common questions
Did the Einstein body simply make everyone smarter?
No. The overall gain was modest, and the benefit depended on individual differences: it was larger for participants with higher estimated IQ and especially for those with low self-esteem.
Why measure implicit age bias?
Einstein's virtual body was much older than the participants, and earlier work suggests embodying an out-group member can weaken negative automatic associations with that group.
Could the effect be due to Einstein being famous rather than old?
Yes. The authors acknowledge they cannot separate age from eminence, so a famous young body or a non-famous old body would be needed to tell them apart.
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