How video call glitches may be messing with your life : NPR
Brief glitches during video calls may seem unimportant, but a new study suggests they can have a negative effect on a person’s credibility.
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Those pesky glitches that occasionally interrupt your video calls can be more than just an annoyance: They could hinder your success in everything from job interviews to sales pitches to court cases.
Indeed, brief video freezes, lags or audio echoes can create an unpleasant “weird” feeling that makes the viewer less likely to trust the person they are interacting with over a face-to-face video connection, according to a study. series of experiments published in Nature.
The findings suggest that people with poor internet access, such as those in rural areas, may be hampered by the very technology that has been hailed as a way to ensure equal access to important services such as medical care or job opportunities.
“If they don’t have access to a good quality internet connection, it will likely affect their chances of getting a positive result,” explains Melanie Brucksone of the study’s authors at Columbia University.
She explains that as teleconferencing has become more common during the coronavirus pandemic, researchers have wondered how video quality might affect people’s interactions. So his colleague Jeff Johnson from the University of Missouri-Kansas City conducted interviews with businesspeople to see if they thought small technical glitches could hurt their virtual sales pitches.
These leaders insisted that the momentary disruptions were of no consequence.
“We anticipated that the glitches might be a problem, and then we ran into this kind of consensus from ordinary users that no, there’s no chance that they would be a problem,” says Jacqueline Rifkinco-author of the study from Cornell University.
To see who was right, she and her colleagues did an experiment. Participants were told they would watch a sales pitch from a financial advisor. Half of them watched a video without problems, while the others watched a video that had been edited by the researchers so that the screen briefly froze during pauses in the salesperson’s speech; the video was problematic, but none of the actual information in the sales pitch was lost. Viewers were asked to imagine they were a potential customer, then later asked how likely they would be to work with that salesperson as a customer.
“Just having these little, tiny issues on the call has significantly reduced or significantly reduced people’s interest in working with the salesperson,” Brucks says.
This made researchers wonder what other types of video call interactions might be sabotaged by technical glitches.
So they designed another experiment involving an interactive health consultation about sunscreen. The actor playing a health worker inserted problems during pauses when speaking. Afterwards, only 61% of viewers said they trusted the health worker. This is lower than the 77% of viewers who trusted health advice after interacting with the same actor on a call without issue.
Similarly, a mock job interview showed that people were less likely to want to hire someone whose video showed these issues.
Next, the researchers gathered data from 472 online court hearings and found that problematic video calls in these real-life cases were associated with a lower chance of getting parole.
“The presence of problems was associated with a 12 percentage point difference in the frequency with which incarcerated individuals regained their freedom,” their report noted.
According to the researchers, all of these negative effects only occurred when the problems occurred when people were talking face to face. If someone shared their computer screen to, say, view a graph or illustration, the problems didn’t seem to bother the viewer too much.
Perhaps that’s because modern video calls can create a sensation of talking to a person face-to-face that feels surprisingly real, but a technical glitch abruptly shatters that illusion. Researchers already know from their work in the worlds of computer animation and robotics that nearly, but not quite, perfect human simulations can scare people, an effect known as the uncanny valley.
The glitches are a shocking reminder that the person looking you in the eye isn’t actually in the room, Rifkin says. “And that’s where this strangeness, this strangeness comes in. It’s very subtle. This creepy feeling that arises is responsible for all these negative effects on hiring, taking medical advice and wanting to be friends with someone you chat with online.”
The only potential remedy that researchers have found so far is to make a quick joke right after a technical problem. For example, if the financial advisor in a problematic video simply said, “They say some Internet connections are better than others.” I guess this one’s one of the others,” this modest attempt at humor might go some way to repairing the damage done to the viewer’s confidence.
This new research draws attention to an aspect of video communications that is typically left out of discussions about remote work and virtual meetings. Stefano Puntoni at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.
“This is a very systematic and careful investigation of a large effect,” says Puntoni, who studies human behavior and AI as well as the adoption of new technologies. “It’s just surprising how much this affects things that are Really important to people. »
He said the findings on the parole hearings were particularly striking.
“The outcome depends significantly on whether they were lucky or unlucky, meaning whether or not they had the issue at that hearing,” he says, “which is obviously very unfair.”
For him, the main takeaway message is: “Make sure you have a good connection. ” And while people who think about digital inequality typically classify people as having or not having access to the Internet, he says, this study shows that a key point “seems to be how good of an Internet do you have?”
