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Social Presence: A Key Trust-Building Mechanism for Virtual World Collaborations

By Dr Shalini Chandra

 

The three-dimensional (3-D) virtual world (VW) is the new Internet revolution allowing users to “step into” the Internet and offering immense business potential. It provides a virtual space for users to socialize and interact using their digital identities (avatars). This VW emerging recently as metaverse, promises to transform the global workplace collaboration landscape by enabling real-time, media-rich interactions at a significantly lower cost than other means of communication. Organizations are beginning to experiment with this immersive 3-D virtual collaboration tool for global meetings, seminars, training programs, recruitment drives, and even social events.

 

Experts sense a big future for VWs in workplace collaborations and compare the current VW hiccups to those faced by the 2-D Internet in the 1990s. However, many organizational employees don’t find the possibilities of VW convincing and are often reluctant to adopt this 3-D VW as a workplace collaboration tool. Consequently, our two-member research team, Prof Shirish C Srivastava from HEC Paris, and I delved deeper into the barriers and enablers of using VWs as workplace collaboration tools. Inherent uncertainties within VW environments are often cited as a significant impediment to their utilization. In this research, we studied the possible mechanisms to mitigate uncertainties in VWs to foster trust and eventual acceptance as a workplace collaboration tool.

 

VWs mark a transition from static 2-D Web pages to cognitively rich 3-D Web places where users can be socially present and display their behaviours and emotions through their avatars. This enhanced sense of close social interactions or social presence in VW differentiates VWs from other previously examined 2-D Web. Hence, in this research, we studied the key role of social presence in reducing uncertainties and influencing user trust in VWs to enable their use in workplace collaborations.

 

Uncertainties in Virtual Worlds

Collaboration through VWs involves several identity, authentication, and security risks. Because of the anonymity of VW environments, individuals may not readily trust the virtual identities represented by avatars. Virtually interacting members can easily hide information, and their behaviours cannot be guaranteed. Additionally, VWs bring together people of diverse backgrounds for collaboration, which creates potential for conflict. Technology mediation makes it harder for people to resolve conflict, which further exacerbates uncertainties. The lack of identity controls can amplify the uncertainties associated with VW interactions.

 

However, with the transition from 2-D online web pages to 3-D VW web places, where virtual users can display facial expressions and emotions and interact with a sense of colocation, socialness present in VWs is the key to reducing uncertainties. Socialness closely corresponds to “social presence” for virtual interacting members. We proposed “social presence” as the critical trust-building factor in VWs.

 

Social Presence in Virtual Worlds

Social presence is the sense of being together in a virtual environment with one another as real societal members. VWs have a high degree of social presence, incorporating several communication cues, such as avatars’ facial expressions, gestures, and bodily movements, in addition to verbal and textual communication. Due to social presence, the user perceives distant entities as close, increasing their felt intimacy and psychological closeness. The perceived social distance between the collaborating members diminishes, and they may view virtual meetings as analogous to traditional face-to-face meetings.

 

The study

To study the influence of social presence in reducing uncertainties and building trust in VWs for workplace collaborations, we adopted a mixed-methods approach by combining quantitative data collected through a survey with qualitative data from interviews with VW users. Our results established the nuanced role of social presence in influencing user trust in VWs.

 

Key Takeaways for Organizations

Our study highlights the importance of mitigating prevailing uncertainties in VWs to establish user trust and social presence as a critical trust-building mechanism useful for organizations attempting to understand and implement operations in VWs. The salience of socialness in VWs indicates that practitioners should consider social-presence-building features in VWs for fostering user trust and facilitating the utilization of VWs in workplace applications.

 

Further, our qualitative interviews identified boundary conditions that may limit the use of VWs for workplace collaborations in organizations, including organizational willingness to try using VWs, understanding the learning curve, devising a multiple-tool collaboration strategy, formulating laws and regulations relating to VWs, and identifying the contexts where VWs will be useful for collaboration. These conditions need to be appropriately considered, along with the need to reduce uncertainties and facilitate effective utilization of VWs for workplace collaborations. The results give practitioners essential guidelines for facilitating VW usage in workplace collaborations.

 

 

(The author is Dr Shalini Chandra, Professor (Information Systems), SP Jain School of Global Management, and the views expressed in this article are her own)