Virtual Reality, Empathy and Environmental Ethics.

Plain-language summary

Environmental ethics is a sub-branch of ethics that determines moral values and principles towards the environment. It is the common responsibility of all humanity to improve and protect the environment/nature and to hand it over to the next generations. For this reason, every segment of society should have environmental ethics awareness. Empathy is an important concept in raising awareness of environmental ethics. It is stated that the awareness of environmental ethics is also developed in people who have developed empathy skills. For this reason, it is recommended to create training programs that enable people to develop their empathy skills. The formation and establishment of environmental ethics awareness in people can prevent the occurrence of environmental problems. This can be achieved by providing an effective environmental education. Technological developments such as virtual reality can be used in environmental education. Virtual reality technologies are called empathy machines as they create a sense of presence in users. For this reason, the perception of presence in virtual reality and being included in the narrative are effective in developing empathy in the person. It is stated that the perspectives acquired in virtual reality develop empathy and encourage behaviors in favor of society in a few weeks. Virtual reality technologies are useful for us researchers, both in terms of developing empathy towards environmental problems and creating awareness of environmental ethics as an educational tool. For this reason, in this study, the effect of virtual reality supported environmental education on nurses' empathy and environmental ethics awareness levels was tried to be examined with a quasi-experimental research.

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