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Category: Project

Description: This study compared two job interview training methods: (1) immersive virtual reality (VR) simulations, and (2) chat-based training. Results show that our VR training significantly improved individuals' job-interview self-efficacy and lowered their task-related anxiety. The chat-based intervention had similarly favorable effects. The positive effects on self-efficacy and anxiety from both trainings persisted over four months. The VR training, however, required only 50% of the training time for comparable success, and participants reported a preference for the VR experience—recalling it more vividly and expressing a higher willingness to reengage in similar trainings. Mediation results align with our proposed framework for social skill acquisition in immersive environments and establish VR's effectiveness through key psychological pathways—physiological arousal, as well as cognitive and motivational factors. Our work contributes a conceptual framework to the growing body of literature on learning in VR and empirically highlights that VR trainings can provide an engaging and efficient method for training complex social behaviors in a simulated, safe, standardized, and scalable environment.