| Summary: | The metaverse, an immersive and rapidly expanding digital ecosystem, is revolutionizing how individuals interact, learn, and engage in virtual environments. Cybersecurity behaviors within the metaverse are crucial to protecting sensitive user data, ensuring safe learning environments, and preventing disruptions from cyber threats. Its rapid adoption, especially in sectors like education, makes it a prime target for cyber threats. Behavioral factors extend beyond technological vulnerabilities, as students' actions shaped by psychological aspects are essential in either reducing or increasing these risks. Understanding and addressing these behaviors is essential to preserving data security, maintaining trust, and ensuring the long-term viability of the metaverse. Without understanding and addressing students’ cybersecurity behaviors, the metaverse’s full potential is at risk, making investigating these behaviors a pressing necessity. This research develops theoretical model to examine students’ cybersecurity behaviors in the metaverse by integrating Protection Motivation Theory (PMT), Technology Threat Avoidance Theory (TTAT), and the Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB). These theories collectively explore how perceived threats, avoidance motivation, attitudes, subjective norms, and response costs influence users’ protective behaviors. Data collected from 701 metaverse Iraqi students were analyzed using a hybrid structural equation modeling-artificial neural network (SEM-ANN) analysis. The findings reveal that perceived threat is the most significant factor influencing cybersecurity behavior, with a normalized importance (NI) of 100%. Other influential factors include avoidance motivation (NI = 83.24%), attitude (NI = 82.42%), response costs (NI = 75.68%), subjective norms (NI = 73.76%), and response efficacy (NI = 48.73%). Of the eleven proposed hypotheses, nine were supported, emphasizing the critical interplay between psychological and technological dimensions in shaping student behavior. Additionally, mediation analysis shows how perceived threats and the desire to avoid them affect cybersecurity behavior, providing a more complete picture of how people think and feel. This study contributes to cybersecurity and the metaverse body of knowledge by integrating TPB, TTAT, and PMT into a unified model, able to explain the variance in cybersecurity behavior in metaverse environment. It extends TTAT and PMT to novel contexts, highlights the role of coping and threat appraisals, and adapts TPB to include avoidance motivation. The findings address gaps in understanding students' responses to cybersecurity threats in the metaverse, uncover cultural nuances among Iraqi students, offer region-specific implications for improving security practices, and challenge assumptions about perceived behavioral control and self-efficacy in the metaverse. The use of a hybrid SEM-ANN approach offers methodological innovation for future research on complex behaviors. Practical recommendations derived from this research include simplifying security protocols to reduce response costs. Educational institutions should increase awareness of cyber threats by highlighting the severe consequences of data breaches through training sessions, immersive simulations, and real-world examples, and promoting peer influence through community initiatives and success stories. These insights serve as actionable guidance for developers, decision-makers, and service providers to strengthen cybersecurity and ensure the sustainability of the metaverse as a secure and trusted virtual space in education.
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