Researchers at Stanford University in Silicon Valley have confirmed what millions of remote workers already know: ‘Zoom fatigue’ causes more stress than real-life encounters due to the ‘non-verbal overload’ of endless video calls.
A study by Jeremy Bailenson, professor of communications and founding director of the Stanford Virtual Human Interaction Lab, found that the underlying causes of Zoom fatigue include: “excessive amounts of close-up viewing” and “increased self-evaluation of staring at the video” of yourself ”.
“Zoom users see reflection of themselves at a frequency and duration never seen before in media history – and probably the history of humans,” Bailenson wrote.
Some of these problems can be solved by ‘trivial changes’ to Zoom’s user interface, he suggested, such as automatically hiding the ‘selfie’ window that reflects back to the user after the first few seconds of a call. .
Bailenson also recommends that Zoom users themselves make simple changes to reduce the tension, such as reducing the size of the video window so that other faces do not feel so close.
More video meetings should simply be conducted as phone calls, he added.
Bailenson’s new article, published in the magazine this week Technology, mind and behavior, is hailed by Stanford as the “first peer-reviewed article that systematically deconstructs Zoom fatigue from a psychological perspective”.
This is accompanied by a separate study, which has not yet been peer-reviewed, which uses a “Zoom Exhaustion and Fatigue” scale to measure the impact. After thousands of people completed a questionnaire, Bailenson said there is a ‘strong theoretical reason to predict’ that women are more affected than men by watching videos of themselves all day.
Millions of knowledge workers around the world have now spent the best part of the year in savings rooms and home offices, as the pandemic and waves of barricades forced the closure of the office.
As a result, video conferencing applications such as Zoom, Microsoft Teams, and Google Meet have exploded. Zoom’s share price has almost quadrupled in the past year, giving it a market value of more than $ 100 billion.
Bailenson says he thinks Zoom is ‘fantastic’ and ‘works fantastic’, but has become a ‘punching bag’ for frustrated office workers. “We can not control much of our lives, but we can shout about Zoom,” he said in an interview with the FT.
He acknowledged that the problems of Zoom fatigue pale in comparison to the daily trauma experienced by medical staff in overcrowded hospitals. Even in developed countries, millions of people do not have access to reliable broadband connections, and many cannot afford the necessary hardware to make video calls.
Stanford research nonetheless highlights the mental burden of being forced to sit in front of a camera and look at screens filled with faces – including our own.
“At Zoom, behaviors that are usually reserved for close relationships – such as long stretches of direct gaze and faces seen up close – have suddenly become the way we deal with informal acquaintances, colleagues and even strangers,” Bailenson wrote.
Bailenson said he had tried to talk to Zoom about his findings, but that he was “still waiting for the meeting to be planned”.