Researchers at Stanford University in Silicon Valley confirmed what millions of remote workers already knew: “Zoom fatigue” causes more stress than real-life meetings because of the “non-verbal overload” of endless video calls.
A study by Jeremy Bailenson, professor of communication and founding director of the Stanford Virtual Human Interaction Laboratory, found that the underlying causes of Zoom’s fatigue include “excessive amounts of looking closely” and “increased self-assessment of looking at a video yourself ”.
“Zoom users are seeing reflections of themselves with a frequency and duration never seen before in the history of the media – and probably in the history of people,” wrote Bailenson.
Some of these problems could be solved with “trivial changes” in Zoom’s user interface, he suggested, such as automatically hiding the “selfie” window that reflects the user back to himself after the first few seconds of a call.
Bailenson also recommends that Zoom users themselves can make simple changes to reduce tension, such as decreasing the size of the video window so that other faces don’t look too close.
More videoconferences should be held simply as calls, he added.
Bailenson’s new article, published this week in the magazine Technology, Mind and Behavior, is announced by Stanford as 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It is accompanied by a separate study, not yet peer-reviewed, which uses a scale of “Exhaustion and fatigue zoom” to measure the impact. After thousands of people answered a questionnaire, Bailenson said there was a “strong theoretical reason to predict” that women are more affected than men for watching videos of themselves all day.
Millions of knowledge workers around the world spent most of the year in vacant rooms and home offices, as the pandemic and waves of blockages forced offices to close.
Videoconferencing applications like Zoom, Microsoft Teams and Google Meet have grown as a result. Zoom’s stock price nearly quadrupled last year, giving it a market value of more than $ 100 billion.
Bailenson says he thinks Zoom is “amazing” and “works great,” but it has become a “punching bag” for frustrated office workers. “We can’t control much of our lives, but we can scream about Zoom,” he said in an interview with FT.
He acknowledged that Zoom’s fatigue problems lessen compared to the daily trauma faced by medical staff in overburdened hospitals. Even in developed countries, millions of people do not have access to reliable broadband connections and many cannot afford the hardware needed to make video calls.
However, Stanford’s research underlines the mental burden of being forced to sit in front of a camera and look at screens full of faces – including ours.
“At Zoom, behavior normally reserved for intimate relationships – like long periods of staring and faces close up – has suddenly become the way we interact with casual acquaintances, coworkers and even strangers,” wrote Bailenson.
Bailenson said he tried to talk to Zoom about his findings, but “was still waiting for the meeting to be scheduled.”