Virtual reality and sustainable behavior in business Albert Jolink *, 1 , Eva Niesten SKEMA Business School –Universit eC^ ote d’Azur, Campus Grand Paris, 5, quai Marcel Dassault, 92150, Suresnes, France ARTICLE INFO Keywords: Virtual reality Sustainability Corporate responsiveness Green demand ABSTRACT In this short communication we propose virtual reality (VR) as an experimental approach to study sustainable behavior in business, taking advantage of its characteristics that provide objective assessment methods with high validity. This approach exploits VR capabilities to generate immersive environments that recreate situations under which theorized relationships of sustainable behavior reveal themselves. We conjecture that high-immersive virtual environment (HIVE) research on corporate responsiveness to green demand will improve our under- standing of the conditions and contexts under which a theory-driven approach to study this sustainable behavior applies. 1. Introduction In the late 1990s, the sense of urgency for the conservation of the natural environment led some commentators to the conclusion that if no action was taken, future generations would only be able to experience ‘nature’ in virtual reality (Norton and Costanza, 1998). Let there be no misunderstanding: this was not a comment in favor of virtual reality. Over the last twenty years, the relationship between the natural envi- ronment and virtual reality (VR) has gradually improved. The general understanding was that if the virtual reality technology could prevent major pitfalls in the construction of buildings that had not yet been built, it can also assist in environmental crises that have not yet happened. In this short communication, we conjecture that VR research is an additional way forward to further the current research on sustainable and responsible consumption. In this short communication we focus on the intersection of sustainable and responsible consumption, VR technology and management; or, more specifically, we will focus on sustainable behavior in business and show in an example how a VR environment can improve our understanding of the conditions and contexts under which businesses respond to green demand. A first step to address these issues with VR is to exploit the VR capabilities to generate fully immersive environments that recreate situations under which theorized relation- ships of sustainable behavior reveal themselves. The next step would be to introduce experiments to these fully immersive environments. We propose VR here as an experimental approach, which we will refer to as ‘black box simulation’, taking advantage of its characteristics which can provide objective assessment methods with high validity. These characteristics include high presence, high-immersive VR environments triggering real-world reactions, more natural interactions eliciting more natural behaviors in experimental settings, physiological real-time measurements avoiding subjective bias and potentially (unnoticed) real-time assessments offering efficient behavioral metrics, such as eye tracking. The final step is to design fully immersive VR experiments in which managerial decision making interacts with sustainable and responsible consumption. VR technology thus allows to test theoretical propositions in management and business studies that have been devel- oped for (epistemically) inaccessible areas, often referred to as ‘black boxes’, such as managerial decision making or corporate responsiveness. In the next sections of this short communication we will briefly discuss the development of VR in sustainability, and of VR in business, followed by the literature on management experiments in virtual reality. We propose an experimental VR setting while assessing the type of behavioral measures VR experiments can deliver and the experimental contexts in which these VR measures can be connected to theoretical black boxes from which new insights may be obtained. We will focus on pro-environmental behavior, i.e., corporate responsiveness to green de- mand, as an example of a black box simulation promoting environmen- tally sustainable behavior. We conclude by offering a research agenda for the future and discuss some limitations of a VR experimental approach. 2. Background of VR technology in sustainability The background of virtual reality technology is a sequence of waves of discoveries, alternating between applications for the military, for space * Corresponding author. E-mail addresses: albert.jolink@skema.edu (A. Jolink), eva.niesten@skema.edu (E. Niesten). 1 This work was supported by the SKEMA Grant for the project “Virtual Traits: Understanding Visualizations of Animated Management”. Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Cleaner and Responsible Consumption journal homepage: www.journals.elsevier.com/cleaner-and-responsible-consumption https://doi.org/10.1016/j.clrc.2021.100012 Received 14 December 2020; Received in revised form 26 February 2021; Accepted 27 February 2021 2666-7843/© 2021 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by- nc-nd/4.0/). Cleaner and Responsible Consumption 2 (2021) 100012