Metaverse adoption among university Generation Z in Malaysia and Saudi Arabia: A cross-cultural analysis of individual, social and ethical impacts

Changes in the fields of education, entertainment, and social interaction have been generally attributed to an immersive, data-intensive environment referred to as the metaverse. In this study, the main objective is to examine statistical associations between UTAUT/PMT constructs and metaverse adoption, and between adoption and perceived individual, social, and ethical outcomes, in two university student samples. The study proposes a calibrated extended UTAUT version through the incorporation of PMT's coping appraisal, with self-efficacy and facilitating conditions considered as coping capacity (response efficacy), and curiosity/exploration considered as an adaptive driver under uncertainty. This cross-sectional survey study obtained 620 survey data from Malaysia and Saudi Arabia, after which they were exposed to PLS-SEM, with MICOM for establishing measurement invariance, and PLS-MGA for group comparison. The study found UTAUT's main drivers, namely performance expectancy, effort expectancy, and social influence, to be the main predictors of adoption in the two countries, in addition to self-efficacy, technological aptitude, and learning motivation. Based on the findings, there were three major cross-country differences, one of which is the parental support and facilitating conditions, which appeared stronger in Malaysia, and secondly, curiosity/exploration was found to be higher in Saudi Arabia. Moreover, a positive relationship was found between adoption and perceived benefits across individual, social, and ethical dimensions. According to the outcome of the robustness tests that control for metaverse experience for both countries and gender for the sample from Saudi Arabia, produced consistent patterns. Notably, the findings need to be interpreted for Gen Z university students based on a platform-agnostic design. Accordingly, coping capacity was found to contribute value beyond UTAUT in immersive contexts and provides culturally sensitive levers for stakeholders, particularly policymakers, educators and developers, while laying down directions for future studies that are probability-based, platform-stratified, and longitudinally designed. Because the design is cross-sectional and uses non-probability sampling, all inferences are correlational; reported paths reflect statistical associations rather than causal effects, and generalizability is limited to similar student populations.