On Zoom, behavior ordinarily reserved for close relationships — such as long stretches of direct eye gaze and faces seen close up — has suddenly become the way we interact with casual acquaintances, coworkers, and even strangers.
BY:
Eric De Grasse
Chief Technology Officer
1 March 2021 (Paris, France) – Zoom, the poster child of the pandemic economy, reports its earnings on Monday; investors will want to hear about its prospects once people around the world are vaccinated. The company has become a barometer of progress against Covid-19. Along with other stay-at-home stocks like Peloton and Netflix, its price has dipped on positive vaccine news.
Don’t expect executives to mention the biggest recent headline about Zoom, though: researchers at Stanford published a paper explaining the psychology “Zoom fatigue” and its four causes:
👀 Too much eye contact
🙈 Constantly looking at yourself
🚷 Staying in the same spot
👋 Harder to communicate nonverbally
Video calls may be exhausting, but the bullish case for Zoom is simple: lots of large companies are anticipating a shift toward hybrid work once the pandemic ends, meaning they’ll still need video conferencing services. And you’ll still need a ring light (and for more on why click here).
A summary of the Stanford study:
They key take-away: “Zoom fatigue” causes greater stress than meeting in real life because of the “non-verbal overload” of endless video calls. The study found that the underlying causes of Zoom fatigue include “excessive amounts of close-up eye gaze” and “increased self-evaluation from staring at video of oneself”. Jeremy Bailenson, professor of communication and founding director of the Stanford Virtual Human Interaction Lab and head of the study, wrote:
“Zoom users are seeing reflections of themselves at a frequency and duration that hasn’t been seen before in the history of media — and likely the history of people. Some of these problems could be solved with trivial changes to Zoom’s user interface, such as automatically hiding the “selfie” window that reflects the user back at themselves after the first few seconds of a call. I also recommend that Zoom users themselves could make simple changes to reduce the strain, such as shrinking the size of the video window so that other faces do not feel so close. And more video meetings should simply be conducted as phone calls. There is no need for a video chat.”
Scientists who read the study were impressed because it is the first peer-reviewed article that systematically deconstructs Zoom fatigue from a psychological perspective. It is accompanied by a separate study, not yet peer reviewed, that uses a “Zoom Exhaustion and Fatigue” scale to measure the impact. After thousands of people completed a questionnaire, Bailenson said there was a “strong theoretical reason to predict” that women were more affected than men by seeing video of themselves all day.
Millions of knowledge workers around the world have now spent the best part of year in spare bedrooms and home offices, as the pandemic and waves of lockdowns forced office closures. Video conferencing apps such as Zoom, Microsoft Teams and Google Meet have boomed as a result. Zoom’s share price has almost quadrupled in the last year, giving it a market value of more than $100bn.
Bailenson said he thought that Zoom was “awesome” and “works fantastically” but had become a “punching bag” for frustrated office workers. “We can’t control a lot of our lives but we can yell about Zoom”.
And, he emphasised, the problems of Zoom fatigue paled in comparison with the daily trauma faced by medical staff in overloaded hospitals. Even in developed countries, millions of people lacked access to reliable broadband connections and many could not afford the hardware required to make video calls.
Nonetheless, the Stanford research underlines the mental burden of being forced to sit in front of a camera and stare at screens filled with faces — including our own. Bailenson ended the study with a summary that included:
“On Zoom, behavior ordinarily reserved for close relationships — such as long stretches of direct eye gaze and faces seen close up — has suddenly become the way we interact with casual acquaintances, coworkers, and even strangers. We have tried to speak to Zoom about his findings but was still waiting for that meeting to be scheduled.”
