Last year, Jeremy Bailenson spent a week in shelter-in-place and spoke to a BBC reporter and got a revelation.
“Why are we zooming? We don’t need to be on Zoom,” he thought. A phone call would have been enough.
This core realization became an opinion piece that Bailenson wrote in the Wall Street Journal entitled “Why Zoom Meetings Can Exhaust Us.”
Bailenson, a communications professor 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, in which he lists four underlying causes of fatigue from video conferencing.
First, the format subjects us to prolonged close eye contact.
Near an elevator, Bailenson says in his paper, people avoid making eye contact.
During in-person meetings they may look at the speaker, but they also look down to take notes or look elsewhere.
“On Zoom, you get eye contact 100% of the time, whether or not you speak,” said Bailenson in an interview.
Our computer screens add to the intensity.
In speaker view on a laptop screen, a person’s face appears to be about 12 inches tall, Bailenson said.
That’s the real-world equivalent of someone standing just over five feet away from you.
According to Edward T. Hall’s proxemic theory, anything closer than two feet feels like an encroachment on the intimate space usually reserved for family and close friends, Bailenson said.
“But during work visits,” he said, “we are actually in each other’s intimate space for hours and hours a day.”
The second problem is cognitive overload.
As we talk about Zoom, Bailenson notes, not only are we sending more signals, such as by explicitly nodding or giving a thumbs up, but we’re also getting signals that we don’t always have the context to process.
For example, what looks like a side eye could 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 like they were getting unshakable, undivided eye contact from their teacher 100 percent of the time.
The students paid more attention, but it cost him, Bailenson said.
While the look in that study was “ socially fake, ” just as people don’t stare directly at you about Zoom, it felt “ perceptively real, ” Bailenson said. “And that makes us exhausted.”
Third, Zoom forces us to stare at ourselves.
Here, Bailenson cites research showing that people are more likely to self-evaluate when they see their reflection, which can be stressful.
And finally, Zoom limits our mobility in ways that can be stifling.
Some studies show that children retain more of what they learned in math when 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 is a fair amount of literature saying that exercise causes better cognitive function,” said Bailenson.
Our interactions on Zoom opened new avenues for exploration for Bailenson, including how we are perceived based on our location within the Zoom grid and whether we are happier having our meetings packed or dispersed.
In collaboration with other researchers, Bailenson devised a 15-point scale to measure how much general, physical, social, emotional, and motivational fatigue people feel during video conferencing.
However, Bailenson is quick to add that he is not anti-Zoom.
It has been an important means of communication during the pandemic, he said, and could be made more bearable with a few adjustments.
For starters, Bailenson recommends hiding the “self-view” feature in Zoom. He also suggests minimizing the zoom window so it’s big enough to see social cues, but not so big that it feels like you’re being stared at.
Another tip: tweak your Zoom setup so it feels right, whether that’s adjusting the lighting around your camera or using an external webcam or keyboard that allows you to sit further away.
Finally, Bailenson recommends only making phone calls or audio when possible.
“Since we started talking, I’ve been in three different chairs,” Bailenson said during the interview, which took place over the phone. “You just sit there on Zoom.”