Commissioner Roger Goodell's exempt list

Roger Goodell can often times seem a bit robotic, and incapable of human emotions and feelings such as sympathy and empathy. It comes as no surprise then that he made a trip to Stanford’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab to learn about empathy. Robots work better with other robots, I guess.

Stanford professor Jeremy Bailenson, the director of the Lab, spoke to writers from the Verge and ReCode to talk about how VR could be used to train human beings who don’t feel empathy to feel it, and the conversation is certainly a unique one. He also talked about how Goodell came down to the lab recently for some of that training.

“He came here to learn about empathy,” Bailenson said. “He really wanted to understand how to think about issues of race, issues of gender. A lot of our lab’s research is about having people think about becoming someone else, and that’s why Goodell came.”

Can’t hurt, especially considering how tone deaf Goodell has seemed during major PR crises of the past few years. Adam Silver also made a trip to the lab recently to learn about fan experiences at NBA Games, because he is quite capable of showing empathy already as evidenced by his decision to exile a racist owner and take the All-Star game out of a bigoted state.

You can listen to the podcast below where these discussions occurred, and the talk about Goodell begins at around the 25-minute mark. VR is certainly intriguing, and using it for empathy training is more intriguing still.

[SB Nation]

About Matt Lichtenstadter

Recent Maryland graduate. I've written for many sites including World Soccer Talk, GianlucaDiMarzio.com, Testudo Times, Yahoo's Puck Daddy Blog and more. Houndstooth is still cool, at least to me. Follow me @MattsMusings1 on Twitter, e-mail me about life and potential jobs at matthewaaron9 at Yahoo dot com.