Nina Rapoport
Postdoctoral fellow
,
Aix-Marseille Université
, Faculté d'économie et de gestion (FEG)
- Status
- Postdoctoral fellow
- Research domain(s)
- Behavioral and experimental economics, Labour economics
- Thesis
- 2025, Paris School of Economics, Sorbonne Economics Center
- Download
- CV
- Contact
- nina.rapoport[at]univ-amu.fr
- Address
Maison de l'économie et de la gestion d'Aix
424 chemin du viaduc, CS80429
13097 Aix-en-Provence Cedex 2
Nina Rapoport
Abstract
This review examines how virtual embodiment interventions can inform economic research on inequality across social groups. These interventions, widely used in psychology and related disciplines, consist of using virtual reality to embody individuals in virtual bodies whose appearance can be experimentally manipulated. By varying key characteristics such as skin-tone, gender, or age, researchers caninduce the illusion of inhabiting the body of an outgroup member. I synthesize existing research on outgroup embodiment and provide both a practical guide to designing embodiment interventions and a critical assessment of the methodological trade-offs involved in their implementation. In addition, I discuss how combining embodimentinterventions with tools from experimental economics can serve two purposes: first, to advance research on social inequality by introducing new methods to study its socio-cognitive foundations; and second, to address open questions in the embodiment literature by testing whether “changing bodies” can change not only minds but also behavior.
Keywords
Discrimination, Inequality, Prejudice, Identity, Virtual reality, Experimental economics