2.1 Neurodiversity in the Workplace
A hindrance to successful workplace outcomes for the neurodiverse (ND) community is the lack of knowledge and awareness regarding their needs and experience on the part of their neurotypical (NT) co-workers [
23,
26,
29]. Studies have shown that organizations with no experience employing ND individuals focus on these individuals’ perceived inability to conform to workplace behaviors deemed socially acceptable by NTs [
47], creating a non-starter attitude for inclusive employment.
For example, autistic employees experience challenges participating in group interactions, flexibility, and managing conflict professionally [25, 45], even as they excel at systematizing and information processing [4]. These challenges often arise in situations governed by NT social rules, which are not always explicitly stated. For example, Morris et al. describe an autistic programmer who responded to code critique by ’blowing up’, not realizing this was viewed unprofessionally. For people with intellectual and developmental disabilities (ID), a major barrier is employers’ willingness to hire them. Heron et al. reported concerns such as healthcare premium costs and the need for specialized training as factors that decrease willingness to hire people with ID [27]. However, a survey conducted by The Institute for Corporate Productivity to understand the landscape of employing people with ID reported that perceived concerns about hiring these employees are significantly higher than challenges of actually employing them [
42],
indicating a need for more awareness of experiences of people who have actually worked with ND employees.
Creating further tensions, the modern workplace is designed around NT preferences and abilities, and does not consider needs or accommodations of ND employees [
31]. For example, differences in communication of autistic employees, such as challenges in reading and understanding facial expressions or tone of voice [
33,
34], have a major impact on vocational experience [
23,
29]. In response to this, some ND employees prefer asynchronous communication (email, instant messaging), so that they have time to consider the conversation and decide how to respond appropriately while other ND individuals prefer to take direction in person [
45]. The recent shift many companies are making to remote work culture has intensified workplace challenges for some ND employees. Not only are
technological tools not designed for accessibility by ND individuals [
61], but accommodations that are beneficial to ND employees, like conversations structured by turn-taking with protocols that reduce time-pressured responses, are not supported
by these tools (or
by NT workplace culture in general) [
13].
These different workplace preferences demonstrate the unique challenge in this research, as the experience of every ND individual is subjective due to each person demonstrating a range of characteristics and presentations [
26]. Another challenging aspect of understanding the needs of ND employees is that the experiences of neurodiversity that make employment difficult can be largely invisible, and therefore can be overlooked by NT co-workers and employers [
38]. For example, a common experience of ND individuals is sensory sensitivity to physical environments [
3]. From interviews of ND employees working in IT, Morris
et al. surfaced that bright office lights and the "open floor plan" work setup are particularly distracting for the ND group, and many feel that quiet, private office spaces would be beneficial to their workplace experience [
45]. Further, both computer-based and in-person meetings can be challenging for ND employees. For some individuals, computer-based meetings can elicit feelings of anxiety due to sensory overload and difficulty reading social cues in a virtual environment [
13,
71]. Situations and experiences such as those discussed above can detract from the ND individual’s ability to perform their job and execute their workplace strengths.
Unfortunately, the above mentioned "unseen" challenges are typically misunderstood by NT employers and co-workers, and can result in termination [
8]
and social rejection [51]. Complicating the experience of unseen challenges in the workplace, ND employees may camouflage their ND characteristics in part to avoid discrimination and ’fit in’, which can lead to negative mental health outcomes for NDs [
32,
39]. Lai
et al. found in a sample of 60 autistic adults, both men and women practiced camouflaging, indicating that many adults are well aware of their differences and how to change themselves to fit in [
39]. Despite this, many vocational training advocates and programs focus on training the ND individual to accommodate
NT workplace norms, rather than focusing on educating the NT employees on how they can adapt their behaviors and attitudes to accept and support their ND co-workers [
3,
29].
While vocational training for ND individuals does result in positive outcomes, such as increased interview skills and job placement [
29], a 2021 review of literature found that there is a lack of academic research on
how employers of ND individuals
can build NT employees’ skills for accommodating NDs. The review found that most research on vocational interventions follow the medical model, which assumes that the ’impaired’ individual should adapt
to workplaces designed for NTs, ignoring the ways that NT individuals can build more welcoming environments [
14]. Additionally, studies show that traditional diversity education approaches, many of which are used in vocational programs, ’problematize’ diversity and focus on assimilation [
24]
, instead of recognizing strengths ND employees bring to environments and building supports for these strengths [4]. Our research intends to shift from designing interventions under the medical and assimilation models to designing an intervention that aligns with the social model, emphasizing the importance of altering the environment by increasing knowledge and building empathy amongst NT employers and co-workers to build workplace experiences that are friendly to ND employees.
2.2 Empathy Building with VR
Building empathy can benefit social interactions, and many organizations have invested in technology to increase empathetic communication [
28].
Hoffman defines empathy as "an affective response that is more appropriate to someone else’s situation than to one’s own situation" [30]. This work adopts the view that there are multiple types of empathy, including affective empathy (feeling the same emotions as another) and cognitive empathy (understanding the thoughts of another) [12, 43]. Research suggests cognitive empathy can be improved by active, intentional attempts to detect and draw inferences about others’ emotional state [12]. Perspective-taking is an activity that requires this type of active, intentional engagement, and there is substantial research on how understanding another person’s perspective results in prosocial and empathetic behaviors. Many technologies
aim to increase general empathy by employing perspective-taking, where the participant is immersed in an experience from the perspective of another. Traditionally, participants are asked to imagine themselves in another person’s shoes, so to speak, by reading a written scenario or watching a video from the perspective of an outgroup member. However,
Martingano et al. report different mediums of perspective-taking activities (e.g., reading vs. VR) could build different types of empathy, where VR is highly effective at building affective but not cognitive empathy [43]. They suggest that this may be because VR simulations are a passive experience that require little cognitive effort by the user. Perspective taking can reduce prejudice, increase understanding of other worldviews, and attenuate biases [
63]. Researchers have used this technique to build empathy toward disabled and ND people through "disability simulations," which attempt to replicate the experience of disability for able-bodied and neurotypical people [
18].
Studies of VR perspective-taking simulations have shown that they can result in empathetic behaviors toward an outgroup population [
10,
28], particularly in increasing affective empathy [
43]. Further, the more realistic and embodied the experience is, the more likely participants are to expend energy [
10] and financial resources [
28] to help people with different life experiences. Herrera
et al. suggest that a higher level of immersion and interactivity with a perspective taking method is more effective at building enduring empathy [
28]. Traditional perspective taking methods,
such as imagining an unfamiliar sensory experience can be cognitively taxing for individuals [
63], and these methods do not allow for bodily immersion or interactivity. Because VR systems are specifically designed to immerse the user in a simulated experience, they provide an ideal platform to create a novel perspective taking experience, making VR a promising tool for promoting shared understanding and communication between NT and ND employees in the workplace [
37].
Virtual reality-based systems can provide experiential learning of outgroup perspectives by using sensory manipulation to build sense of presence [
11], which Gehlbach
et al. suggest increases positive outcomes for perspective taking experiences using VR [
22].
Some of these affordances have been shown to increase feelings of presence in users, including stereoscopic visuals, wide visual field and user-tracking [11]. By manipulating sensory input, VR systems afford the experience of embodiment by producing vivid sensory experiences that allow the user to experience the scenario as if it were happening to them, and thus enhance the processing of the information in the first person [
1,
10,
55]. Researchers have found that people who experience VR simulations spend more effort [
2] and show greater support for outgroups for longer periods of time [
28]. Further, utilizing VR as a perspective taking platform can address the "unseen" workplace challenges that ND individuals face in the workplace that would be difficult to imagine in traditional methods. For example, manipulation
of the user’s sensory environment (light, sound, etc.) can simulate environmental sensory sensitivity experienced by ND individuals, an experience that few NT people can imagine [
1].
Notably, outcomes of empathy building and disability simulation studies have been inconsistent, leading to criticism that these simulations are not helpful [
18] and may actually lead to decreased assessments of capability of disabled people, even as NT participants feel more sympathy for those with disabilities [
46,
54]. These findings suggest simulations may be acting as ’pity machines’ rather than building constructive understandings of others. Recently, researchers have suggested that these types of simulations are ableist [
53], and make a ‘spectacle’ of disability [
6].
Because perspectives and challenges of neurodiversity are novel to NT users, a lack of context and history of lives lived with these differences can produce narrow and inaccurate conceptualizations of the outgroup’s abilities [
6], creating a ’pity machine’ which makes people feel bad for outgroup members rather than understanding their complete experience. Embodiment of a person’s disabilities, such as being blind, can lead the user to understand the challenges of the circumstance, rather than the adaptation that is associated with it. Often, simulated challenges fail to suggest an individual’s ability to adapt to them [
54]. In fact, some researchers have suggested that asking people to imagine experiences and their reactions within them may not foster constructive empathy, due to what Gallagher termed "the diversity problem" — people tend to imagine what
they would do in a given situation instead of imagining how a person with a
different life experience may react [
20]. This is a recognized problem within the field of disability simulations [
6].
Acceptance and awareness of neurodivergent individuals have been pursued in other ways, including positive representations of neurodivergence in the media, as with the autistic Sesame Street puppet Julia [5]. In these representations, NTs can see ND characters in narratives. Narrative structure has been shown to increase empathy, for example narrative-formatted news reporting of healthcare-related dilemmas create more empathy for people in stigmatized groups than non-narrative formatted reporting [
49]. Further, building a sense of social presence in virtual reality by increasing the realism of avatars [
48,
65], strategies such as sharing personal information [
48,
70], showing realistic mannerisms like nodding and blushing [
48], and developing in-group associations [
70] are factors that increase the experience of immersion [
48]. By gathering details about a person’s lived experience, collecting personal viewpoints, environments, mannerisms, and stories, we hope to take advantage of the empathy-building components of narrative structure and social presence to develop VR experiences that lead to enduring empathy.
To ensure that VR experiences do not create negative outcomes,
we propose simulations of both strengths and challenges of the ND-inclusive workplace experience. We further
suggest combining narratives with VR’s capabilit
ies to create immersive, embodied experiences. We
suggest VR experiences be
structured in a way leading to enduring and constructive empathy. We ground our research in the social model of disability, which posits that disability or difference is not centered with the individual, but rather with the failings of the social environment to recognize and accommodate the natural differences that occur in the human condition [
41]. In making the target user of the system the NT co-worker of the ND individual, we aim our efforts at the social environment of the workplace by surfacing design requirements for VR experiences that will facilitate NT understanding of how physical and attitudinal changes to the workplace can support environments where NDs thrive. This focus supports our intention to shift the burden of change and educate NT individuals on how they can better adapt to and accept their ND co-workers.