Last year, Jeremy Bailenson spoke to a BBC reporter and had an epiphany.
“Why are we zooming? We do not have to be on Zoom, ”he thinks. A phone call would suffice.
This core of accomplishment became an upgraded article that Bailenson wrote in the Wall Street Journal entitled, “Why We Can Exhaust Meetings Through Zoom.”
Bailenson, a professor of communication and founder of the Virtual Human Interaction Lab at Stanford University, wanted to dig deeper.
That’s why he wrote an academic paper published Tuesday in Technology, Mind, and Behavior, which lays down four underlying causes of fatigue at the video conference.
First, the format subjects us to prolonged eye contact at short distances.
Bailenson points out in his newspaper in the immediate vicinity of an elevator that people do not make eye contact.
During personal meetings, they can look at the speaker, but also look down to take notes or look elsewhere.
“With Zoom, you get eye contact 100% of the time, no matter if you’re talking,” Bailenson said in an interview.
Our computer screens increase the intensity.
In the speaker view on a laptop, a person’s face appears about 12 inches long, Bailenson said.
This is the right equivalent of someone standing a little over 1½ feet away from you.
According to Edward T. Hall’s proxemic theory, anything closer than 2 feet feels like an encroachment on the intimate space usually reserved for family and close friends, Bailenson said.
“Yet during work calls we are in each other’s intimate space for hours and hours a day.”
The second issue is cognitive overload.
While talking on Zoom, Bailenson, we not only give more directions, for example by nodding emphatically or giving a thumbs up, but we get clues that we do not always have the context to process.
For example, what looks like a side-eye may just be someone looking at an email notification.
In one of Bailenson’s experiments, researchers used virtual reality, so that the two students in the study each felt that they were receiving unwavering, undivided eye contact from their teacher 100% of the time.
The students paid more attention, but Bailenson cost it.
Although the gaze in the study was ‘socially false’, just as people do not really stare directly at you, it feels ‘perceptive’, Bailenson said. “And it causes us to become exhausted.”
Third, Zoom forces us to stare at ourselves.
Here, Bailenson cites research that shows that people are more likely to evaluate themselves when they see their reflection, which can be stressful.
And lastly, Zoom limits our mobility in restrictive ways.
Some research shows that children retain more of what they have learned in math than they have to gesture with their hands. And people who walk and talk come up with more creative ideas than people who sit still.
“There’s quite a lot of literature that says that moves cause better cognitive functions,” Bailenson said.
Our interactions with Zoom have opened up new research paths for Bailenson, including how we are viewed based on our location within the Zoom grid and whether we are happier when our meetings are merged or distributed.
In collaboration with other researchers, Bailenson devised a 15-point scale to measure how much general, physical, social, emotional, and motivational fatigue people experience as a result of video conferencing.
However, Bailenson quickly adds that he is not anti-Zoom.
It was an important communication tool throughout the pandemic, he said, and could be made more tolerable with a few adjustments.
For starters, Bailenson recommends that you hide the “self-viewing” feature in Zoom. He also suggests minimizing the Zoom window so that it is large enough to see social indications, but not so large that it feels like you are staring.
Another tip: Tink with your Zoom setup to make it feel good, whether you need to adjust the lighting around your camera or use an external webcam or keyboard to keep you seated.
Finally, Bailenson recommends making telephone calls or audio calls only if possible.
“Since we talked, I’ve been sitting in three different chairs,” Bailenson said during the interview, which took place over the phone. “With Zoom, you just sit there.”