Social presence is your research keyword. There's a long history of research done which can be pretty much summed up with Cliff Nass's contention that people confuse humans with computers a lot, and transactional status ends up being important because of this.

I think that in practice, VR will not promote empathy for the same reason that social networks have not: because status aggrandizing products will be too popular. You already see this in horror games, where they become literally too scary for VR because the lowering of status in transaction feels too real.

Look up the Proteus effect: that will lead to some detrimental things whenever it gets implemented in the social applications that people will come up with. So there will come new Instagrams, and they will be more terrible than the old social networks.