Responsible Business in the Metaverse: Social Dynamics and Ethical Considerations

Call Owner: Eleonora Viganó
Digital Society Initiative / University of Zurich, University of Applied Sciences of the Grisons

Challenge & Idea:
We are addressing a critical gap at the intersection of business innovation and social responsibility in the metaverse. The metaverse offers unprecedented opportunities for businesses to create immersive virtual hubs that connect with global audiences. Swiss businesses in the retail, financial, and insurance sectors, as well as some Swiss public entities have already begun establishing metaverse presence. Yet there is limited research on how to build these environments in a responsible way. The metaverse fundamentally transforms human interactions in ways traditional online platforms do not – through embodiment, liveness, and real-time engagement -requiring new frameworks for responsible engagement.

We propose a collaborative research initiative that – through interviews with selected companies operating in the metaverse and/or designing metaverse infrastructures – will:
1. Explore early social dynamics in business metaverse hubs
2. Identify the informal ethical norms and social codes that are developing in these spaces
3. Document best practices and challenges in creating inclusive, ethical virtual business environments

Our research will focus on two key areas where ethical considerations are critical in metaverse business applications:
1. Customer Experience and Retail: Creating immersive shopping experiences while addressing ethical concerns around persuasive design, avatar representation, and social influence.
2. Professional Collaboration: How companies use metaverse environments for teamwork, training, and meetings, including questions of conduct, inclusion, and identity boundaries.

These use cases represent initial focus areas, as we remain open to exploring additional applications that emerge through our collaboration with participating organizations. Our preliminary research shows that while the metaverse creates new opportunities for business engagement (e.g., enriched customer experiences, global reach), it also presents significant social-ethical challenges such as:

• Questions around avatar representation and identity (including issues of skin color, disability representation)
• Lack of established codes of conduct specific to metaverse interactions
• Risks of social polarization and isolation Furthermore, social interactions with both avatars representing humans and embodied conversational agents pose new social-ethical challenges around behavioral fidelity, emotional sensing, and transparency in metaverse business environments.

Goals:

• Exploration and Community Building: We seek to identify and explore the current socio-ethical challenges of businesses establishing their presence in the metaverse and understand how users interact with conversational agents in multi-user/agent metaverse settings. With companies employing AI-driven avatars we want to assess needs and priorities for design and governance principles for behavioral realism, emotional responsiveness, and role transparency.
• Preparation of Grant Application for Larger Funding: Building on the insights achieved with the first aim, we will prepare a grant application for a larger funding scheme (e.g., Innosuisse, DIZH) in partnership with metaverse platform developers and/or businesses with metaverse presence. This application will propose the development of a set of tools helping organizations address socio-ethical issues and adapt to the unique characteristics of virtual environments.

We are looking for:
We are seeking collaboration with Swiss organizations including NGOs and companies of both small and big size, that are:

• Currently experimenting with metaverse presence
• Planning metaverse initiatives and want to incorporate ethical considerations
• Technology providers working on metaverse infrastructure and wanting to build socially responsible platforms

We’re hoping participating companies will:

• Enable access to conduct interviews with key stakeholders
• Give us the opportunity to observe metaverse interactions (with appropriate privacy protections)
• Participate in a workshop we want to organize on the social dynamics and ethical considerations of business metaverse hubs