Decision Making in Virtual Reality: A Domain of Choice and a Method for Decision Research

Abstract

Virtual reality (VR) lets a researcher place a participant in a supermarket, a burning building, or a moral dilemma and observe the decision-making process from within the situation. Work on such environments is scattered across domains such as experimental economics, consumer research, or safety training, each asking what VR can do within its own domain rather than when immersion matters for a decision as such. First, this article argues that VR is both a domain in which decisions are made and a method for studying them. Second, it identifies four features of a decision situation through which immersion works: spatial context, the body and viewpoint from which a person acts, the emotions carried by the situation itself, and social context. Third, it proposes a diagnostic: what matters is not the realism or vividness of VR but whether such features can be brought into the task. The article draws on studies in which a virtual environment serves as the decision environment, each chosen for what it shows about one of these features. Immersion earns its place when any of them is part of the decision under study; by contrast, standard tasks are sufficient when the formal structure exhausts the research question.