The document discusses the ethical implications of marketing in the metaverse, emphasizing how fully immersive digital environments can enhance persuasive marketing strategies. It explores the psychological factors influencing decision-making, particularly the role of perception, and raises significant ethical concerns regarding the potential for manipulation in these digital spaces. The essay advocates for precautionary measures and legal protections to safeguard individual perception as the metaverse evolves.

1. POLITECNICO DI MILANO
ETHICS FOR TECHNOLOGY 2021-2022
prof. Fabio Fossa
PERSUASION IN THE METAVERSE
Gabriele Morelli, 10803610
Computer Science and Engineering
Course Code: 056233, 5 CFU
Group presentation with group 5: “Ethical implications of the Metaverse and VR technologies”

2. PERSUASION IN THE METAVERSE
Gabriele Morelli
Abstract
Metaverse is a spectrum of how much time and how much engagement we are able to put
between ourselves in a real-world and a digital world. We are getting to the point now where we
can reify that kind of fully immersive digital environment. This opens new opportunities for
marketing because the metaverse has the perfect traits for actuating persuasion marketing. We
see how purchasing is a process that can be influenced by stimuli which are best calculated to
evoke, by influencing the decision-making process, the desired response from the customer.
This leads to some ethical considerations on the degree of persuasion achievable in a fully
immersive digital world.
Keywords
Metaverse, Persuasion marketing, Perception, Ethics.
Introduction
Technology is affecting all aspects of our lives, it is impacting the way people live, and it is
impacting the decisions we make. This overwhelming technological advancement is shaping the
way people live their lives, and how they engage with brands.
According to a survey conducted by Wunderman Thompson Data in July 2021: 62% of global
respondents said that have a “stronger relationship with brands that have a strong digital
presence”.
So, at the foundation of why are we moving towards the metaverse, why are we moving in a
direction that is more digital, this is a good reason to think about it from a marketing perspective.
Of course, this opens new opportunities for marketing, since the metaverse has the perfect traits
to actuate persuasion marketing, in the sense that provides an alternative environment which is
fully immersive, but this also leads to some issues if we consider the degree of persuasion
achievable in a digital world.
This essay begins by explaining what is the metaverse and why it is the natural evolution of the
Internet as we know it nowadays. Subsequently, it describes the purchasing process by means of
the Stimuli-Response model and shows how among the psychological factors that influence the
decision-making process, perception is the most crucial in such digital environment. Following
that, it explains why the metaverse has the perfect traits to perform persuasive marketing. Finally,
it brings some ethical considerations, following a Kantian and then hedonistic view, about the
degree of persuasion that can be achieved in a digital environment.
What is Metaverse?
When I think about the metaverse, I do not think of it as “it is this thing” or “it is this place”, that is
the wrong way to look at it. We have to think of it as what it actually is, a spectrum.
It is a spectrum of how much time you spend in a digitally connected world and how much
engagement we are able to interpose between ourselves in a real-world and a digital world.
The evolution of this spectrum begins with the web. The first interactions we had with the digital
world were browsing the internet, searching around, and surfing the web. The level of

3. engagement at that time was quite low, also the time we used to spend was little, usually around
two hours per day.
The second step is social media. We started introducing some mechanisms such as sharing, liking,
or commenting. This resulted in an increased level of engagement and consequently also the time
we used to spend increased, around four hours per day.
Nowadays, a technology with a level of engagement that borders on the fully immersive, and that
we can spend all day with, does not exist yet. However, we can think about two existing
technologies that give the idea of how much we are getting closer to such levels.
First, smartwatches. They are worn 24 hours per day and can track every piece of data we
produce, but nevertheless, they offer a low level of engagement. Second, let’s think about putting
on some glasses or wearing something that covers your eyes, tracks your eyes' movement, and
responds to it by providing a visual overlay. This last technology could be potentially worn all
waking hours, and at the same time, offer a level of engagement that can be described as “fully
immersive.”
All of this is a spectrum that we are moving along, and we are getting to the point now where we
can reify that kind of fully immersive digital environment. And that is why people are now talking
increasingly about metaverse.
New opportunities for marketing
There is a quote from Spider-Man that says, “with great power comes great responsibility”, while
its adaptation for marketing in the metaverse is “with great engagement comes great
opportunities”. But what these opportunities are? In marketing terms, these are “transactions”:
new opportunities to sell!
So let's dive into how we can push people to transactions in a fully immersive digital environment.
Stimuli-Response model
Since purchasing is a process, we can decompose it in three steps that will be represented by the
“Stimuli-Response” model: External stimuli > Decision-making process > Response.
External stimuli are those that try to influence the decision-making process, to obtain a good
response from the customer.
According to (Loken, 2006) the four psychological factors influencing the decision-making process
are: perception, motivation, attitudes, and learning.
Let’s analyse the one that is the most crucial concerning an immersive digital world: perception.
We can define perception as “the process through which one detects, selects, organizes and
interprets information that receives in order to build a personal significant representation of a
situation and of the world” (Berelson and Steiner, 1964).
Perception in Marketing
The importance of perception is because often what is perceived is more influential than what
exists.
In marketing, perception is more important than reality, because perceptions affect consumers’
actual behaviour. What consumers feel and believe about a product can be just as important as
what that product actually delivers in terms of performance. For that reason, it is important for
marketers to manipulate the perception of their products to create a positive image in the minds
of consumers.

4. By creating the perception in people's minds that they want to have the product, marketers can
get people to make transactions.
Selectivity of information
What is perceived is due to our selectivity of the information. People emerge with different
perceptions of the same object because of three perceptual processes:
1) Selective attention: individuals are more attentive to the stimuli whose deviations are larger
than the normal size of the stimuli. In other words, “Repetita iuvant”, we remember better
something which is repeated many times rather than something that happens only once but with
high intensity.
2) Selective distortion: the tendency to twist information into personal meanings, making a
subjective interpretation based on own preconceptions.
3) Selective retention: the tendency to forget, individuals tend to retain better information that
was the most comprehensible, significant, and confirmatory of preconceptions.
Persuasive Marketing
Consequently, we can see that the metaverse is persuasive by definition: it provides the
participant with an alternative environment, which is fully immersive, seems real and has the
perfect traits for actuating persuasion marketing without even making the user aware of the fact
that is being persuaded.
Entering a digital environment, like the Internet is now, means that every action we perform is
tracked, registered, and stored. Everything we do in such circumstances leaves traces since these
are literally new data produced, which are then saved in registries that can be exploited. This
means that we can collect every possible information of every participant and then we can profile
them with incredible accuracy, knowing everything of them. Sequentially, we can target every user
with exactness. Entering a digital environment, as I said before, leaves traces, so we can know who
is taking part, who is currently in and who is not with a degree of precision that we already
achieved with the current way in which the Internet works nowadays.
This last point requires a further explanation. When I talk about “knowing who is in and who is
not” and by saying that Internet already empower this, I’m referring to the “Computer Cookies”.
Computer cookies are files that include a unique identifier that web servers send to your browser
when you visit a new page. These cookies then can be sent back to the server each time your
browser requests a new page. In other words, when we access Internet, we are assigned a unique
identifier that identifies you all over the web. This is a way for a website to remember you, your
preferences, and your habits online.
So, now let’s imagine that we have a precise and detailed profile of every participant, this can be
used to create stimuli which are subjective and may be confirmatory of individuals’
preconceptions. We also know that we can target every single person with surgical precision and
then bombard them with reiterated and personalized stimuli which are best calculated to evoke,
by influencing the decision-making process, the desired response.

5. Ethical considerations
This brings to some ethical considerations about the degree of persuasion that can be achieved in
a fully immersive world.
Advertising, or marketing in general, has the scope to highlight the values of a product and match
them with the needs of the user, or better “with what the user perceives as a need”.
Now, influencing the perception of a user is what the metaverse, more than any other advertising
tool thank to its intrinsic traits, better allows to do.
Duty ethics - Kant
Following a Kantian thought, in which we should “act as you would want all the other people to
act towards all other people” we see that if we give for granted that every human being has a self-
determination right, especially for what concern social development, in the sense that he should
decide autonomously for himself, persuasion directed at modifying someone’s emotions or
behaviour towards some actions, is highly unethical.
Moral values
As we saw before, one of the four psychological factors that influence the decision-making process
is motivation, which explains the reason why we strive for something.
Let’s now analyse the possible consequences of influencing something deeper than the
perception, the values.
For the value, we intend “a mental content that shapes our actions and justifies why we try to
achieve a specific end”.
One last concept is needed, one of the moral values, which is “mental contents that require
respect and concretisation while we act, no matter what we want.”
We can see immediately that the values are those that support our motivations for actions, but
the moral values are those that influence the actions, and so are the connection between values
and action.
We know also that moral values are neither subjective nor objective, but rather “socially
constructed”. If we analyse this last point with a consequentialist approach, where we focus on
the value of the consequences of an action, we come up with the fact that influencing people,
inculcating into them some artificial values, would make them behave accordingly. However, if
such values were moral ones, then the individual would remain free in the choice of the end even
if forced to pursue it within the boundaries of the morality imposed through the values inculcated.
Since the moral values, or in general the common morality, is socially constructed, it would be
sufficient to influence just a sub-group of the society to obtain a cascading effect in which we can
create an entire society of people with specific artificial values. This might be difficult to be
accomplished in the real world, but not the same can be said for a world which is totally artificial
and fully immersive, as we saw earlier.
Consequentialism: hedonism
Let’s now deepen into this from a hedonistic view. Following the utility principle, in which we
strive to achieve the greatest amount of pleasure for the greatest number, we see that creating a
society based on certain values might be beneficial for the greatest number of participants, we
could get rid of many social issues such as racial discrimination or gender inequality.
However, this leads to some problems, the first one is the fact that these values, of course, cannot
be objective, values are historically and culturally determined.

6. Then, there is the problem related to the “freedom principle”. The principle claims that everyone
should be free to strive for his pleasure. If we strive to achieve the common good, we cannot
neglect the individual pleasure as part of it: the common good should never contravenes you and
your basic interests. Therefore, inculcating values does not respect it because participants would
not be totally free, in the sense that they are influenced in what they perceive as pleasure.
Conclusion
We saw that since the metaverse provide an alternative, digital and fully immersive environment,
in which we can have exact knowledge of everything that happens in it, and due to this, through
persuasion marketing we can achieve a degree of persuasion that has never been seen before. I
then analysed this scenario through two ethical theories, trying to highlight the unethicality of the
possible effects on the society by saying that actuating persuasion marketing in such environment
would be remarkably effective and that could be exploited also for ends beyond the marketing.
To conclude, I would like to give my personal solution to this. The time frame is still quite
extended, there is still some time before we will achieve this super immersive digital world, this
makes the problem quite abstract.
Since it is an innovation with the potential for causing harm and extensive scientific knowledge on
the matter is lacking, I would like to invoke the precautionary principle: institutions should opt for
more discretionary measures until new information is available, relying on academic research and
ethical studies.
In particular, what I tried to achieve here, is to raise awareness about the perception problem. We
need to defend it since the degree of persuasion that can be achieved is dramatic. Therefore, I
would conclude by saying that there is a need to make laws that protect the individuals'
perception in digital worlds.
References
Books:
- Kotler P. & Keller K., (2011). Marketing Management, 14/E, Prentice Hall
- Bernard Berelson and Gary A. Steiner, (1964). Human Behavior: An Inventory of Scientific Findings, New York:
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, p. 88
Articles:
- Frank Essen, (2008), “Stimulus-Response Model”
- Barbara Loken (2006), “Consumer Psychology: Categorization, Inferences, Affect, and Persuasion”
- Slater M., Gonzalez-Liencres C., Haggard P., Vinkers C., Gregory-Clarke R., Jelley S., Watson Z., Graham B.,
Schwarz R., Steptoe W., Szostak D., Halan S., Fox D., Silver J. (2020), “The Ethics of Realism in Virtual and
Augmented Reality, frontiers in Virtual Reality”
- Slater M. (2021), “Beyond Speculation About the Ethics of Virtual Reality: The Need for Empirical Results”
Websites:
- https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbescommunicationscouncil/2018/05/29/the-one-marketing-truism-you-
cannot-ignore-perception-is-reality/?sh=51eb4bdb7030 (last seen May 2022)
- https://www.smartcapitalmind.com/what-is-the-role-of-perception-in-marketing.htm (last seen May 2022)
- https://www.wundermanthompson.com/insight/new-trend-report-into-the-metaverse ( last seen May 2022)