Virtual Reality Puts Protesters Face-to-Face With Force
VR reveals how a show of police force can transform a crowd’s sense of fairness.
Posted May 26, 2026 | Reviewed by Gary Drevitch
A protest march is not just a crowd moving through a street. It has a rhythm, a purpose, a sense of “we,” just like a fragile social organism. People chant, walk, look around, and evaluate what is happening: Are we safe? Are we being heard? Are we being treated fairly?
Now imagine that the march suddenly stops. Up ahead, police have formed a line across the road. In one version of the scene, they wear ordinary uniforms. In another, they appear in riot gear: helmets, shields, and batons. The action is the same in both cases: The police block the protest. But psychologically, the two scenes are not the same at all.
That is the core insight of a recent virtual reality experiment that studied a simple question: Can the visible display of police power change how protestors feel, judge, and intend to act?
To answer this question, we need to take a step back. Collective action is difficult to study in the real world. Demonstrations are unpredictable, ethically sensitive, and politically charged. Virtual reality offers a route to studying collective action as it unfolds by allowing people to experience something closer to participation than a written scenario can provide, while still giving researchers control over the situation.
In the studies, participants entered a virtual demonstration against right-wing populism. They walked with virtual protestors through a city street, hearing the sounds of a march in a completely immersive scenario. Then the police appeared and blocked the way. Some participants saw officers in regular uniforms, while others saw officers in riot gear.
The researchers were not trying to show that VR is the same as real life. It is not. But VR can place people inside a social situation strongly enough to evoke immediate perceptions and emotions. That is crucial, because collective action does not arise only from abstract political beliefs. It also emerges from what people experience in the moment.
The Psychology of Illegitimate Power
A common mistake is to think that crowds become confrontational because individuals lose their reason. The research behind this study starts from a different view: Protestors interpret events through group identity , shared norms, and judgments of fairness.
The research is based on psychological theories suggesting that what a crowd does depends partly on how other groups, especially authorities, treat it. A crowd that sees itself as peaceful and legitimate may become more confrontational if it feels that an outside group has treated it unfairly.
This is where police appearance becomes important: While an everyday uniform communicates authority, riot gear communicates a readiness for force. Helmets, shields, and batons may protect officers, but they also send a message about how the crowd is being categorized. The protestors may read that message as: You are dangerous.
If people believe they are exercising a democratic right, such a message can feel disproportionate. The same police action (i.e., blocking the road) may therefore look more illegitimate when carried out by officers dressed for confrontation.
What the Experiments Found
In the first study, participants who encountered police in riot gear judged them as less legitimate, more threatening, and less competent than those who saw police in regular uniforms. Participants also felt more anxious, but anxiety did not automatically translate into resistance. The researchers adjusted the second study to better capture immediate resistance intentions: Instead of focusing only on facing the police line, they asked participants to reflect on actions such as chanting for the police to leave, continuing the protest, confusing the police with minor actions, or signing a petition against police behavior.
This time, the pattern became clearer, with participants who saw police in riot gear more likely to report intentions to resist the police. The pathway was important: Riot gear made the police seem less legitimate; that illegitimacy was linked to anger ; anger, in turn, predicted anti-police resistance. In other words, the display of force changed what the situation meant.
One of the most interesting findings concerned people who initially identified less strongly with the protest movement. You might expect committed activists to be the most reactive to police in riot gear. But in the second study, the stronger effect appeared among those who began with weaker identification. When these participants encountered riot police, they became more interested not only in anti-police resistance but also in future collective action.
That finding suggests that people on the edge of a movement may be pulled closer not only by persuasive speeches or shared values, but by the experience of being treated as part of a suspect crowd. A line of shields can redraw the boundary between “them” and “us.”
What VR Adds to the Study of Collective Action
This study suggests a new use for VR—that of a laboratory for political moments that are otherwise almost impossible to isolate.
Of course, VR has limits. A virtual police line cannot reproduce the full history that many communities carry into encounters with law enforcement. The study’s participants were mostly young and highly educated; other groups, especially those with more direct experience of discrimination , may respond differently.
Still, the finding is hard to ignore: The visible performance of power can backfire. When authorities appear to treat a peaceful protest as a threat, they may help to create the very resistance they hoped to prevent.
Becker, J. C., Hartwich, L., & Radke, H. R. (2025). The effect of apparent Police power at demonstrations against right‐wing populism on Protestors' resistance using a virtual reality experiment. British Journal of Social Psychology, 64(2), e12809.
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Matilde Tassinari, Ph.D., is a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Helsinki, specializing in the integration of virtual reality and social psychology, with a focus on using immersive technologies to create more equal societies.
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