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One week at an on-site shelter last year, Jeremy Bailenson was speaking to a BBC reporter and had an eye opener.
“Why are we zooming? We don’t need to be on Zoom, ”he thought. A phone call would have been enough.
That Core of Achievement became an opinion piece that Bailenson wrote in the Wall Street Journal titled “Why Zoom Meetings Can Wear Us Out.”
Bailenson, professor of communications and founder of the Virtual Human Interaction Lab at Stanford University, wanted to dig deeper.
So he wrote an academic article, published Tuesday in Technology, Mind, and Behavior, which summarizes four underlying causes of video conferencing fatigue.
First, the format subjects us to prolonged eye contact at close range.
In neighborhoods close to an elevator, Bailenson points out in her article, people avoid eye contact.
During in-person meetings, they can look at the speaker, but they also look down to take notes or look away.
“On Zoom, you get eye contact 100% of the time whether you’re talking or not,” Bailenson said in an interview.
Our computer screens add to the intensity.
When viewed from the speaker on a laptop screen, a person’s face appears approximately four inches long, Bailenson said.
It’s the real equivalent of someone standing a little over a meter and a half away from you.
According to Edward T. Hall’s proxemics theory, anything within 2 feet looks like an encroachment on an intimate space usually reserved for family and close friends, Bailenson said.
“Yet on work calls,” he says, “we’re actually in each other’s intimate space for hours and hours a day.”
The second problem is cognitive overload.
Speaking of Zoom, Bailenson notes, not only are we giving out more clues, such as nodding our heads emphatically or raising our thumbs, but we’re getting signals that we don’t always have the context to deal with.
For example, what looks like a side eye might just be someone looking at an email notification.
In one of Bailenson’s experiments, the researchers used virtual reality so that the two students in the study each felt as though they were receiving constant, unrequited eye contact from their teacher 100% of the time.
Students paid more attention, but it came at a cost, Bailenson said.
Even though the gaze in this study was “socially false” in the same way that people don’t really look at you directly on Zoom, it felt “perceptually real,” Bailenson said. “And that tires us out.”
Third, Zoom forces us to look at ourselves.
Here, Bailenson cites research showing that people are more likely to rate themselves when they see their reflection, which can be stressful.
And finally, Zoom limits our mobility in ways that can be overwhelming.
Some research shows that children retain more of what they have learned in math when they are required to gesture with their hands. And people who walk and talk have more creative ideas than people who sit still.
“There’s a fair amount of literature that says moving around leads to better cognitive function,” Bailenson said.
Our interactions on Zoom have opened up new avenues of research for Bailenson, including how we are viewed based on our location in the Zoom grid and whether we are happiest when our meetings are clustered or dispersed.
In collaboration with other researchers, Bailenson proposed a 15-point scale to measure the general, physical, social, emotional and motivational fatigue that people experience as a result of video conferencing.
Bailenson, however, is quick to add that he is not anti-Zoom.
This has been an important communication tool throughout the pandemic, he said, and can be made more tolerable with a few adjustments.
For starters, Bailenson recommends hiding the “auto-view” feature in Zoom. He also suggests minimizing the Zoom window so that it is large enough to see social cues, but not so large that it looks like you are being watched.
Another tip: DIY your zoom setup to make it feel good, whether that’s adjusting the lighting around your camera or using an external webcam or keyboard that lets you sit further away.
Finally, Bailenson recommends making phone or audio calls only when possible.
“Since we’ve been speaking, I’ve sat in three different chairs,” Bailenson said during the interview, which was held over the phone. “On Zoom, you’re just sitting there.”
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