At Stanford, there are ongoing experiments with simulations that depict the process of getting evicted and becoming homeless. And there have long been disability simulations, in which participants sit in wheelchairs, or get blindfolded, or listen to intrusive sounds so as to simulate schizophrenia. You can slip into an “Age Suit” and experience the aches and pains of an 85-year-old. You can go on Amazon and buy “The Empathy Belly Pregnancy Simulator,” which promises to provide over 20 symptoms of pregnancy, including mild fetal kicking, increased perspiration, and “change in personal and sexual self-image.”

Although all of these simulations have an unpleasant component, they are engaging—you don’t need to coerce people to use them; they will line up to try them out. If I were setting up a fundraiser, I’d be tempted to use VR as a perk for donors and an inducement for those on the fence. There is also the potential for real educational value, as VR could teach people about the physical environments of the people who need support. You probably learn a lot more by actually “walking through” a refugee camp through a VR simulation than by watching a movie or looking at a series of pictures. And if you were indifferent to the suffering of certain people, it’s conceivable that the VR experience might do something to combat this indifference.

But VR is far from the moral game changer that some make it out to be. In part, this is because it’s so focused on creating empathy, and as I’ve argued elsewhere, empathy is a poor guide to charitable giving. Who we feel empathy for is strongly influenced by irrelevant factors such as race and attractiveness and similarity, and our empathy often directs us in the wrong direction. Indeed, it can be exploited by unscrupulous actors to make the world worse. If you want to do good, you should focus on where your money will make the most positive difference, not on whose suffering you are prompted to feel more acutely.

But even putting this aside, it turns out that VR doesn’t actually help you appreciate what it’s like to be a refugee, homeless, or disabled. In fact, it can be dangerously misleading.

The problem is that these experiences aren’t fundamentally about the immediate physical environments. The awfulness of the refugee experience isn’t about the sights and sounds of a refugee camp; it has more to do with the fear and anxiety of having to escape your country and relocate yourself in a strange land. Homeless people are often physically ill, sometimes mentally ill, with real anxieties about their future. You can’t tap into that feeling by putting a helmet on your head. Nobody thinks that going downtown without your wallet will make you appreciate poverty—why should these simulations do any better?

One specific limitation of VR involves safety and control. During the debates over the interrogation practices of the United States during the Iraq war, some adventurous journalists and public figures asked to be waterboarded, to see what it was like. They typically reported that it was awful. But in fact their experience fell far short of how terrible actual waterboarding is, because part of what makes waterboarding so bad is that you get it when you don’t want it, by people who won’t stop when you ask them to. Safety and control transform unpleasant experiences into loads of fun, which is why we pay to play war games and have paintball battles, get frightened by shrieking maniacs in a haunted house, or engage in certain masochistic sexual activities.