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Metaverse: Could creating a virtual world build a more sustainable one?
This is a critical moment in the environmental and social sustainability of the metaverse. Business leaders can’t be spectators.
If the previous section seemed a bit of a downer, here’s some good news. The metaverse doesn’t just pose behavioral challenges for companies — it also creates unprecedented opportunities to improve behavioral and health outcomes. Here are a few:
Reducing unconscious bias
Unconscious bias is an insidious challenge because, by definition, it is prejudice that people aren’t even aware of. It can exist in ostensibly tolerant individuals, often driven by deeply rooted societal stereotypes about others based on characteristics such as their racial identity, gender, age or body weight.
The common thread through these characteristics is that they are typically based upon sensory cues: for instance, one’s physical appearance or pitch of voice. This makes the metaverse potentially transformative, since it provides an unprecedented ability to strip away these sensory cues, via avatars that allow users to change their appearance, gender, race and voice.
This could combat unconscious bias in hiring and recruitment. Hiding the race, gender and age of an applicant from an interviewer could eliminate the potential for unconscious bias. More proactively, companies and educational institutions could use this for sensitivity training. Metaverse experiences that allow individuals to inhabit alternate personas could enable them to experience the world from the perspective of another race or gender, increasing awareness and sensitivity.
Improving long-term behaviors
The metaverse could also help people with long-term behaviors. In this case, experiences would not be about allowing people to experience the world from someone else’s perspective as much as from their own perspective at a later date.
To appreciate the potential opportunity, consider that some of the most stubborn and expensive challenges we face as a species are linked to long-term behaviors. Scientists have been warning us about climate change for decades, yet we have repeatedly failed to sufficiently curb our carbon emissions. For equally long, it has been apparent that simple changes in diet, exercise and other behaviors would put a serious dent in chronic disease, which accounts for the largest portion of global health care spending. Whether as consumers or politicians, we have an unhealthy relationship with debt because of our unwillingness to spend less and save more. If we don’t change our ways, each of these challenges will impose global costs in the tens of trillions of dollars in years ahead.
The problem is not awareness or even motivation to change. Behavioral economists have found the issue instead lies in some universal biases in human behavior: we tend to excessively discount future outcomes as well as consequences that are invisible or intangible.
Conversely, this also means we are highly motivated by outcomes that are immediate and apparent — and this is where the metaverse could be very effective. Imagine avatars that put people in the shoes of their future selves based on their current health behaviors. Imagine experiences that let you walk through your neighborhood in a climate-ravaged future. Making the future consequences of our actions tangible and immediate could motivate people to improve behaviors in their own long-term interests.
Mental health benefits
Lastly, the metaverse has huge potential in addressing some significant mental health challenges. Consider post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) — an often crippling affliction that will affect 1 in 13 people at some point in their lives. The US Department of Veterans Affairs has been successfully piloting virtual reality to treat PTSD. By reliving their traumatic experiences in a safe, controlled simulated environment, veterans are able to confront and tame their PTSD symptoms. While many associate PTSD with military combat, the affliction is quite common in the overall population and is on the rise. The COVID-19 pandemic, for instance, has fueled a silent epidemic of PTSD among frontline workers.
The metaverse is similarly useful in treating numerous other afflictions that are on the rise, from anxiety to phobias. Immersive environments could take exposure therapy — a common modality for treating phobias — to the next level. It could be game changing for amputees, where virtual reality has been shown to be effective in tackling issues such as phantom limb pain.
The metaverse has significant potential for improving health and behaviors. To achieve it, policymakers and companies will need to consider issues of accessibility. Otherwise, a metaverse that requires expensive hardware and high-speed connections could exacerbate the digital divide and prevent these benefits from reaching many people who need them most.