Immersive Technologies Affecting Psychological Factors that Lead to Voluntary Pro-Environmental Behavior: A Transdisciplinary Survey

We often read about environmental issues, but we rarely personally witness them. Because of this lack of direct experience, people often perceive environmental threats as events distant in space and time and therefore underestimate their risks. Although direct contact with environmental threats might enhance people's risk perception and engagement, in reality such experiences may be dangerous, costly, and complicated to implement. One strategy to bridge this gap could be communication through virtual immersive experiences. This meta-research identifies the key psychological factors that lead to voluntary pro-environmental behavior (PEB) that have been investigated in previous studies using virtual experiments. After a systematic review of the existing literature, we conclude that immersive virtual experiences can influence some of the psychological factors that are important predictors of pro-environmental behavior, namely, concern, risk perception, connectedness to nature, intrinsic motivation for pro-environmental behavior, psychological distance, and presence. This work makes an academic and a practical contribution. It provides a foundation for policy makers and environmental communicators who want to enhance their campaigns with immersive storytelling, and for researchers who want to enrich and contextualize laboratory experiments that test environmental behaviors and risk preferences.