About

Jeremy Bailenson is the founding director of Stanford University’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab and holds the position of Thomas More Storke Professor in the Department of Communication. He is also a Professor (by courtesy) of Education, a member of the Program in Symbolic Systems, and a Senior Fellow at the Woods Institute for the Environment. Bailenson earned his B.A. in Cognitive Science from the University of Michigan in 1994, followed by an M.S. and Ph.D. in Cognitive Psychology from Northwestern University in 1996 and 1999, respectively. He spent four years at the University of California, Santa Barbara as a Post-Doctoral Fellow and Assistant Research Professor. His research focuses on the psychology of Virtual and Augmented Reality, particularly how virtual experiences influence perceptions of self and others. His lab develops and studies systems that enable virtual social interactions and investigates how these experiences can transform education, environmental conservation, empathy, and health. Bailenson has received numerous awards, including the Dean’s Award for Distinguished Teaching at Stanford and the IEEE Virtual/Augmented Reality Technical Achievement Award in 2020. He has authored over 250 academic papers across multiple disciplines and has been continuously funded by the National Science Foundation for over 25 years. His first book, 'Infinite Reality,' co-authored with Jim Blascovich, became an Amazon Best-seller and was quoted by the U.S. Supreme Court. His recent book, 'Experience on Demand,' has been reviewed by major publications and also achieved Best-seller status. Bailenson has contributed opinion pieces to prominent outlets and produced or directed six Virtual Reality documentary experiences, which have been featured at venues including The Smithsonian and The Tribeca Film Festival.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Psychology
• Social psychology
• Engineering
• Human–computer interaction
• Social Science
• Sociology
• Machine Learning
• Aesthetics
• Medicine
• Computer vision
• Epistemology
• Multimedia
• Applied psychology
• Art
• Communication
• Data science
• Developmental psychology
• Chemistry
• World Wide Web
• Cognitive psychology
• Cognitive science
• Philosophy

Selected publications

• An Explication and Classroom Field Study of the Virtual Human Interaction Lab’s Expert (VHIL-E) LLM

  Cyberpsychology Behavior and Social Networking · 2026-03-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  VHIL-E is the Virtual Human Interaction Lab’s Expert, a large language model (LLM) representing the lab’s research, teaching, and outreach on virtual and augmented reality. We first motivate the project and then present best practices for implementing a retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), specifically the “Seven Cs”: collecting , cleaning , classifying , chunking , creating embeddings, correlating embeddings into an index, and connecting the index to an LLM. We collected academic publications, transcribed public talks, dedicated interviews and news articles about the lab’s research, and various curriculum materials from Virtual People, the lecture course taught about the lab’s research for over two decades, resulting in over 2.3 million words broken into ∼10,000 chunks. In study 1, we compared performance on a multiple-choice test of 231 questions between various implementations of the RAG system and traditional Base GPT models. Models generally performed well, between 83 and 90 percent, similar to student performance on course examinations. In study 2, an open-ended task implemented over 10 weeks in the Fall 2025 Virtual People course, students ( N = 89) used VHIL-E to query and understand the course materials and logged hallucinations, which were “egregiously wrong answers.” Students then chose the single worst wrong answer over 8 weeks. They then compared the Base/RAG Hybrid—which prioritized the RAG but allowed ChatGPT to consult its general intelligence—to the RAG Constrained, which limited substantive information to the embedded index. Allowing VHIL-E access to GPT produced more than twice as many hallucinations as constraining it to the index. We discuss implications for scholars who build and use RAG-based LLM applications.

  PublisherDOI

• Virtual Reality as a Research Tool

  2026-02-03

  book-chapterSenior author

  This chapter provides an overview of the research possibilities of studying social cognition and communication using virtual environments. We begin by giving an overview of the related technology, specifically the hardware and software used to develop and support virtual reality experiences. Then, we review and contextualize three methodological problems of experimental social psychology outlined by Blascovich and colleagues in 2002, namely the experimental control-mundane realism trade-off, lack of replication, and the use of nonrepresentative samples, and specifically focus on how VR can mitigate the three problems. We next give examples of research topics social scientists have studied using the framework provided by Fox and colleagues’ 2009 work. We then lay out the current landscape of large-scale virtual reality studies with a review of 34 studies, focusing on their setting, recruitment methods and implementations of the VR experiences. Finally, we discuss implications for future research.

  PublisherDOI

• Synchrony and Task Engagement in Virtual Reality: Temporal Dynamics, Predictors, and Psychological Outcomes of Collaborative Behaviors

  Cognitive Science · 2026-04-01

  articleSenior author

  Collaborative behaviors provide useful signals for understanding how minds align through perception and actions. Virtual reality (VR) is a useful tool for studying these behaviors, as it enables fine-grained measurements of coordination in virtual social settings. In this work, we investigate collaborative behaviors in a large-scale classroom VR dataset of space-building activities (N = 146), focusing on dyadic synchrony and individual task engagement during the collaborative group activity. An analysis of collaborative behaviors over time revealed a U-shaped pattern in head and hand synchrony, with a turning point occurring approximately two-thirds into the activity. We found that the likelihood of dyads temporally aligning their object editing behaviors (i.e., nonzero vs. zero synchrony scores) and whether they actively created, edited, or deleted objects all followed an inverted-U shape over time, peaking around midway through the activity. We further analyzed synchrony and task engagement both as possible indicators of individual dispositions (i.e., previous extended reality [XR] and design experiences) and social context (i.e., group size), and also as behavioral signals for how individuals perceive their group members and collaborative outcomes. The findings revealed that collaborative behaviors such as object edit synchrony are shaped by previous XR experience, group size negatively predicted the frequency of object creation, and that the frequency of object deletion is positively associated with perception of group closeness. Taken together, this work advances the understanding of collaborative behavior by modeling its temporal dynamics, identifying predictors and psychological outcomes, thereby demonstrating how VR enables large-scale examination of its cognitive underpinnings.

  PublisherDOI

• Underwater virtual reality and situated cognition: Comparing ground, docked, and floating conditions for ocean connectedness and psychological wellbeing

  Journal of Environmental Psychology · 2026-02-07 · 1 citations

  article
  PublisherDOI

• Not seeing eye to eye: The effects of perceptual conflicts during social interactions in mixed reality

  Computers in Human Behavior · 2026-03-06

  articleSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• A Looking Glass into a Research Wonderland: Decades of Virtual Reality Scholarship Explicated Via Natural Language Processing

  Cyberpsychology Behavior and Social Networking · 2025-04-01 · 6 citations

  reviewSenior author

  How has the field of virtual reality (VR) evolved and what type of research has made an impact? We used natural language processing techniques and generative artificial intelligence to develop the most complete review of experimental social science VR research to date (1992–2024). From a collection of 21,195 abstracts written by 52,543 unique authors, 13 reliable themes emerged over time, with immersive experiences receiving the most recent attention. Interdisciplinary teams were cited more than less interdisciplinary teams, and watershed moments like mainstream industry embracing VR (i.e., Google Cardboard’s release) correlated with changes in scholars’ research focus. Based on such available data, we observed that more than half of all articles over the past 30 years have been published in the last 6 years. Our database—the VRbalARchive —is publicly available, helping scholars investigate VR’s history and enhancing our theoretical understanding of the medium.

  PublisherDOI

• Virtual reality reduces climate indifference by making distant locations feel psychologically close

  Scientific Reports · 2025-10-23 · 4 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  This study examined how virtual reality (VR) can reduce psychological distance to locations affected by climate change, influencing climate emotions and risk perceptions. A total of 163 students listened to a climate change news story of one of nine locations while either experiencing the location in immersive VR or viewing static images of the location. Pre- and post-test surveys revealed that VR experiences, especially for distant locations, reduced psychological distance and heightened climate frustration, reduced indifference, and increased risk perceptions compared to static images. VR also enhanced storytelling investment, measured by written story length, as well as awe and spatial presence. Political ideology moderated VR's impact on emotions and risk perceptions but not on storytelling engagement. These findings demonstrate VR's potential to make distant places feel close, foster emotional connections, alter risk perceptions, and promote climate storytelling.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• BEASTS: Dual Perspectives on Virtual Puppetry through Theatrical Expression and XR Research

  2025-08-10

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Figure 1: Full-body puppeteering of rat-human hoard at Gwangjang Market

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Audio Augmentation of Manual Interactions to Support Mindfulness

  Proceedings of the ACM on Interactive Mobile Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies · 2025-12-02

  article

  Mindfulness is the state of maintaining attention to the present moment with curiosity and openness. Existing mobile technologies to support mindfulness focus on formal practices such as meditation, requiring dedicated space and time. However, everyday mindfulness—a more flexible form of practice woven into routine activities such as washing hands or cooking—remains under-supported. To address this gap, we introduce a wearable device that adopts a sensory-driven approach to foster two key components of mindfulness, attention and curiosity, in everyday contexts. Our device amplifies sounds produced by the user's hand interactions to make them more salient, such as the sounds of hands rubbing together or fingertips sliding across surfaces. By playing back the amplified sounds to the user in real time, the device leads to a fresh perspective on mundane interactions. We conducted a preregistered in-lab study with 60 participants to evaluate the device in an everyday task: object exploration. We found that audio augmentation enhanced self-reported state mindfulness, directing user attention to auditory properties of objects that would otherwise be overlooked. Behaviorally, audio augmentation caused participants to interact with objects for a longer duration than participants who did not experience audio augmentation. We also found that participants exhibited more trial-and-error exploratory behavior patterns with audio augmentation than without, suggesting increased curiosity.

  PublisherDOI

• Time matters in VR: Students benefit from longer VR class duration, but certain outcomes decline after 45 minutes, with large individual variance

  Computers & Education · 2025-04-21 · 8 citations

  articleSenior author
  PublisherDOI

Recent grants

• Exploring the Behavioral and Facial Similarities of Humans and their Virtual Representations

  NSF · $109k · 2007–2009

• CHS: Medium: Collaborative Research: Augmented Reality Agents with Pervasive Awareness, Appearance and Abilities

  NSF · $263k · 2018–2022

• Transformed Social Interaction in Virtual Environments

  NSF · $760k · 2005–2010

• Collaborative Research: Advancing Ocean Literacy through Immersive Virtual Reality

  NSF · $150k · 2019–2022

Frequent coauthors

• Anna Carolina Muller Queiroz

  Stanford University

  44 shared

• Mark Roman Miller

  Illinois Institute of Technology

  38 shared

• Jeffrey T. Hancock

  Stanford University

  35 shared

• Eugy Han

  Stanford University

  28 shared

• Jim Blascovich

  University of California, Santa Barbara

  26 shared

• Mar González-Franco

  26 shared

• Marie Trinh

  Utrecht University

  25 shared

• Mehdi Dastani

  Utrecht University

  25 shared

Labs

• Vice Provost for Student AffairsPI

  Not provided

Education

• B.A.

  University of Michigan

  1994

• Ph.D., cognitive psychology

  Northwestern University

  1999

Awards & honors

• Dean’s Award for Distinguished Teaching at Stanford
• IEEE Virtual/Augmented Reality Technical Achievement Award (…