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research article

Epistemic humility meets virtual reality: teaching an old ideal with novel tools

Starke, Georg  
•
Sobieska, Alexander
•
Knochel, Kathrin
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April 25, 2025
Journal of Medical Ethics

The pace of scientific advancements in medicine, driven by artificial intelligence as much as by novel biotechnologies, demands an ever-faster update of professional knowledge from physicians and collaboration in interdisciplinary teams. At the same time, the increased heterogeneity of patients’ lifeworlds in socially and culturally diverse societies requires healthcare professionals to consider diverging personal and cultural perspectives in their treatment recommendations. Both developments require conveying to students a professional virtue that can be summarised as epistemic humility —a teaching process which, we argue, can and should be supported by novel technologies. By embedding students in realistic scenarios, virtual reality can play a crucial role in teaching medical students a stance of epistemic humility. Such stance implies acknowledging the limitations of one’s knowledge as well as taking individual patients’ perspectives and experiences seriously. In this sense, epistemic humility can also provide a crucial step towards tackling epistemic injustice and biases in medicine. We discuss how teaching epistemic humility with virtual reality tools can succeed and suggest the development of novel teaching tools that make use of this technology to immersively enable moral growth. Our paper thereby contributes to the emerging field of digital bioethics, calls for more work in the area of experimental bioethics and informs ongoing debates on how medical ethics teaching can prepare future physicians for the challenges of tomorrow’s practice of medicine.

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Type
research article
DOI
10.1136/jme-2024-110591
Author(s)
Starke, Georg  

École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne

Sobieska, Alexander

Technical University of Munich

Knochel, Kathrin

Technical University of Munich

Buyx, Alena

Technical University of Munich

Date Issued

2025-04-25

Publisher

BMJ

Published in
Journal of Medical Ethics
Start page

jme

End page

2024-110591

Editorial or Peer reviewed

REVIEWED

Written at

EPFL

EPFL units
CDH-DI
Available on Infoscience
May 7, 2025
Use this identifier to reference this record
https://infoscience.epfl.ch/handle/20.500.14299/249937
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