Group pressure can often result in people carrying out harmful actions towards others that they would not normally carry out by themselves. However, few studies have manipulated factors that might overcome this. Here male participants (n = 60) were in a virtual reality (VR) scenario of sexual harassment (SH) of a lone woman by a group of males in a bar. Participants were either only embodied as one of the males (Group, n = 20), or also as the woman (Woman, n = 20). A control group (n = 20) only experienced the empty bar, not the SH. one week later they were the teacher in a VR version of Milgram's obedience experiment where they were encouraged to give shocks to a female Learner by a group of 3 virtual males. Those who had been in the Woman condition gave about half the number of shocks of those in the Group condition, with the controls between these two. We explain the results through embodiment promoting identification with the woman or the group, and delegitimization of the group for those in the Woman condition. The experiment raised important ethical issues, showing that a VR study with positive ethical intentions can sometimes produce unexpected and non-beneficent results.Group pressure and the need to conform can result in significant distortions of an individual's judgment and decision making -a well-known case by Asch 1 being misjudgement of geometric shapes under peer pressure. However, Stanley Milgram argued for the distinction between signal conformity and action conformity 2,3 . In Asch's experiment people only verbally signalled conformity with the group but this had no further consequences (signal conformity). In contrast, in one experiment described by Milgram, participants were influenced to (apparently) administer electric shocks of greater and increasing voltage to a stranger at the behest of two confederates who demanded this, supposedly as a learning experiment. This is an example of action conformity since the behaviour of the subject would cause pain to another person. When there were no confederates, participants tended to choose the lowest shocks possible. Taking this out of the lab to real situations, conformity to group pressure can result in people engaging in evil acts that they would not normally do themselves individually, such as in the Stanford Prison Experiments 4 -even to the extent of taking part in mass killings -e.g., Stammers 5 , Chapter 18.The most salient finding of the obedience experiments has been that a surprisingly high proportion of people will administer apparently lethal shocks to a stranger at the behest of an authority figure. This was originally interpreted by Milgram as caused by their obedience to authority. However, alternative explanations have gained currency. Haslam, et al. 6 carried out an analysis of the results of all of Milgram's experiments, comprising 21 different conditions, and found an overall obedience level of 44%. A meta-analysis of the results of all the experiments open Scientific RepoRtS | (2020) 10:6207 | https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-020-...

Virtual Reality (VR) has been widely applied to cultural heritage such as the reconstruction of ancient sites and artifacts. It has hardly been applied to the reprise of specific important moments in history. On the other hand immersive journalism does attempt to recreate current events in VR, but such applications typically give the viewer a disembodied non-participatory role in the scene of interest. Here we show how VR was used to reconstruct a specific historical event, where a famous photograph was brought to life, showing Lenin, the leader of the 1917 October Russian Revolution, giving a speech to Red Army recruits in Moscow 1920. We carried out a between groups experimental study with three conditions: Embodied-where the participant was first embodied as Lenin and then later in the audience watching Lenin; Included-where the participant was not embodied as Lenin but was embodied as part of the audience; and Observing-where the participant mainly viewed the scene from a disembodied third person point of view. Twenty participants were assigned to each of the three conditions in a between-groups design. We found that the level of presence was greatest in the Embodied and Included conditions, and that participants were least likely to later follow up information about the Russian Revolution in the Observing condition. Our conclusion is that if the VR setup allows for a period of embodiment as a character in the scenario then this should be employed in order to maximize the chance of participant presence and engagement with the story.

In western cultures, when it comes to places of worship and liturgies, music, acoustics and architecture go hand in hand. In the present study, we aimed to investigate whether the emotions evoked by music are enhanced by the acoustics of the space where the music was composed to be played on. We explored whether the emotional responses of western naïve listeners to two vocal pieces from the Renaissance, one liturgical and one secular, convolved with the impulse responses of four Christian temples from the United Kingdom, were modulated by the appropriate piece/space matching. In an alternative forced choice task where participants had to indicate their preference for the original recording of the piece (not convolved with any temple-like acoustics) vs. the convolved one, no significant differences were found. However, in the tasks where participants rated their emotional in response to each piece and acoustic condition, the factorial ANCOVA analyses performed on the results revealed significant effects. We observed that, across pieces and spaces, participants found the temple-like acoustics as more transcendent, compared to the acoustics of the original version of the pieces. In addition, they rated the secular piece as more tender and the liturgical piece as more expressive in its original versions, compared to the convolved ones. We conclude that the acoustic signature of the four Christian temples causes an exaltation of certain emotions on listeners, although this effect is not associated to one or another musical piece.

How important is the influence of spatial acoustics on our mental processes related to sound perception and cognition? There is a large body of research in fields encompassing architecture, musicology, and psychology that analyzes human response, both subjective and objective, to different soundscapes. But what if we want to understand how acoustic environments influenced the human experience of sound in sacred ritual practices in premodern societies? Archaeoacoustics is the research field that investigates sound in the past. One of its branches delves into how sound was used in specific landscapes and at sites with rock art, and why past societies endowed a special significance to places with specific acoustical properties. Taking advantage of the advances made in sound recording and reproduction technologies, researchers are now exploring how ancient social and sacred ceremonies and practices related to the acoustic properties of their sound environment. Here, we advocate for the emergence of a new and innovative discipline, experimental psychoarchaeoacoustics. We also review underlying methodological approaches and discuss the limitations, challenges, and future directions for this new field.