Introduction/Purpose: Empathy gaps between policy makers and those experiencing poverty limit effective intervention design. This study examines how an immersive virtual reality simulation, co-designed with lived-experience experts, transforms municipal professionals' understanding of poverty through perspective-taking.
Method: Nine iterative activities with lived-experience experts, financial specialists, and citizen groups produced a virtual reality simulation guiding users through impossible trade-offs, bureaucratic complexity, and immediate social consequences. Five focus groups with Dutch public policy professionals (N=47) experienced the simulation before discussion, with follow-up surveys five weeks later (n=15). Thematic analysis examined perspective-taking and meaning-making processes.
Results: Systematic constraints within the narrative enabled perspective transformation through two mechanisms. First, accumulated pressures depleted the analytical processing capacity professionals typically use to maintain interpretive distance. When educated professionals could not navigate welfare forms despite their competence, explanations based on individual responsibility lost credibility. Participants shifted to structural explanations through experiencing barriers rather than receiving information. Second, limiting access to problem-solving tools exposed how expertise functions as an interpretive barrier. Professionals possessed solution knowledge but could not apply it within the simulation's constraints, revealing how their problem-solving orientation assumes agency that clients often lack.
Conclusions: Emotional engagement alone proves insufficient for attribution change in expert populations with analytical frameworks enabling cognitive distancing. Strategic limitation of expertise makes professional assumptions visible for critical examination. The participatory design process demonstrates how collaborative narrative construction addresses ethical concerns while maintaining psychological authenticity. Implications include professional training protocols incorporating experiential constraint and design principles for narrative interventions targeting attributions.