TORONTO – An influx of virtual meetings may not be the only factor causing “Zoom Fatigue” in potentially millions of people during the COVID-19 pandemic.
According to a group of American researchers, even the design of video conferencing apps could destroy you.
Technology like Zoom – which rose from 10 million to more than 300 million in a few months last year – imposes physical limitations on users, requires more cognitive labor, can amount to a ‘mirror for the whole day’ and forces everyone to turn to each other to stare at.
The constituent physiological effects of those factors can be exhausting, said researchers at Stanford University in California, who launched a new online study to measure Zoom fatigue.
“Zoom’s interface design is constantly beaming faces to everyone, no matter who is speaking,” Jeremy N. Bailenson, a communications professor at Stanford University, writes in a new paper published in the journal Technology, Mind and Behavior.
“From a perceptual point of view, Zoom effectively turns listeners into speakers and smothers everyone with a look in the eye.”
THE ‘EYE-GAZE DANCE’
In a typical environment, people don’t stare into each other’s eyes that long. Think of a lift or an Uber ride. We’ve developed social norms that make it okay to avert your gaze for extended periods of time.
In a meeting environment, people tend to use eye contact sparingly, said Jeff Hancock, the founder and director of the Stanford Social Media Lab.
“Conversations are really like a dance with the eyes,” he told CTVNews.ca on Wednesday via Zoom. People often make eye contact, acknowledge the connection, look away, and return at various intervals, partly because staring causes physiological arousal and awakens the nervous system.
THE ‘MIRROR ALL DAY’
Video conferencing apps also require an increased ‘cognitive load’, meaning users send and receive more signals than in normal settings, including the need to frame yourself in the camera, taking into account the volume of your voice, and more physical responses such as nod to a speaker.
While they may require more physical considerations, Zoom meetings also require less of us physically and can feel restrictive, researchers said. There are no pacing around a room, no interruptions in the water cooler or other movements that research has shown can cause better performance in meetings. Instead, we stick to the ‘truncated’ look, the specific space in which the webcam frames the user.
Perhaps one of the bigger problems for some video conferencing app users is what the Stanford researchers called a kind of “all-day mirror.” The default setting of video apps such as Zoom is to show the user an image from their own camera. Seeing it for yourself can have positive results, Hancock said, pointing to a study where researchers placed a mirror in front of a candy bowl and found that people took more candy when there was no mirror.
“Sometimes it is a reminder of who we are and what we try to be – a good person – that can be valuable. But if we just constantly look in the mirror over time, it can lead to questions like ‘I don’t look the way I want to look’, ‘I am not who I want to be’. It reminds us that we are not that ideal version, ”said Hancock.
TIRED REDUCTION
There are a number of built-in strategies that video conferencing users can use to reduce the impact of Zoom fatigue, the researchers said, such as the “Hide self view” button to avoid the “all-day mirror” effect. The researchers also recommend using an external webcam and keyboard to get more space on the screen and vary your seating position. They also suggest making use of the audio-only feature in the apps, or simply recording the phone when video isn’t needed.
“Phone calls have boosted productivity and social connection for many decades, and only a minority of phone calls require staring at someone else’s face to communicate successfully,” Bailenson wrote.
As part of the new online study, Bailenson and Hancock’s team developed a new framework to measure Zoom fatigue, in the hope that they can determine if any of these strategies improve user reporting of Zoom fatigue.