Ethical Concerns in Metaverse Development: A Mixed-Methods Study of Indian IT Professionals

Abstract

The metaverse-ethics literature has converged on a recognizable taxonomy of concerns. What this taxonomy has not yet provided is a socio-technical mechanism that explains why these concerns persist at the developer interface, and why developer-level interventions remain persistently ineffective. Drawing on an exploratory sequential multi-method design comprising open-ended qualitative survey with 50 Indian IT professionals and a Fuzzy Decision-making trial and evaluation laboratory (DEMATEL) analysis with 12 metaverse experts. Based on Responsible Innovation framework, this study utilized Gioia Method to identify aggregate dimensions from the developer's perspective. This study presents the Experiential Ethical Translation Gap (EETG). EETG is defined as the gap between developers' personal, embodied, and culturally based ethical intuitions and the formal techno-ethical terms they can use to incorporate these intuitions into metaverse design. The EETG has three reflective sub-dimensions that were identified from the data: Affective-Embodied translation Loss, Avatar-identity Authenticity Negotiation, and Vernacular Ethical Resourcing. The study also found that ethical agency externalization is the way EETG leads to the eight identified concerns. In all transcripts, developers express ethical risks using a passive, predictive tone, rather than integrating these concerns into the design process as commitments. This study presents several specific managerial implications, demonstrating that the Indian IT context is theoretically significant rather than merely incidental