Moral conflicts in VR: Addressing grade disputes with a virtual trainer

Abstract

A Virtual Trainer (VT) for moral expertise development can potentially contribute to organizational and personal moral well-being. In a pilot study a prototype of the VT confronted university employees with a complaint from an anonymous student on unfair grading: a plausible scenario. Addressing criticisms from students may be a stressful situation for many teaching professionals. For successful training, adapting the agent’s strategy based on the performance of the user is crucial. To this end, we further recorded a multimodal dataset of the interactions between the participants and the VT for future analysis. Participants saw the value in a VT that lets them practice such encounters. What is more, many participants felt truly taken aback when our VT announced that a student was unhappy with them. We further describe a first look at the multimodal dataset.