Examining the Role of Cognitive Absorption for Information Sharing in Virtual Worlds

Businesses are beginning to use virtual worlds as an innovative means for collaboration and learning among virtual team members, with the intention of harnassing increasing flow of ideas from individuals, and higher levels of productivity within the company. Virtual worlds have paved a new and important channel for user collaboration and information sharing. Motivated by this phenomenon and drawing upon prior studies on technology acceptance and adoption, this paper describes a pilot study to investigate the role of cognitive absorption, the state of deep involvement or holistic experience, in the adoption and acceptance of virtual worlds for collaboration and sharing of ideas. In contrast with previous studies, our proposed research model, grounded in literature on ‘technology adoption’, ‘trust’ and ‘social cognitive theory’, explores environmental factors like user trust and familiarity as key factors affecting cognitive absorption other than the individual factor of perceived playfulness in the context of virtual worlds. Previous IS literature has researched cognitive absorption, but to our knowledge, the current research is the one of the first few studies that brings the concept of social cognitive theory to further explore cognitive absorption in the context of virtual worlds. Our findings confirm cognitive absorption as a strong correlate of usefulness and ease of use of virtual worlds which eventually leads to adoption intentions of virtual worlds. This is on-going research. Future studies involve more participants in different domains to gather deeper insights and wider knowledge on the factors affecting adoption intention of virtual worlds.