Social cognition
Does feeling you have Einstein's body make you think better?
Open access · cc by · source: Europe PMC
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.
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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Key findings
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.
Methodology
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.
Limitations
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.
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