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Just because video technology is pervasive doesn’t mean it’s the best tool for every job. Plus, their attention levels will likely increase. People will appreciate the break from being on camera. So, the next time your team plans to meet over Zoom, consider having a conference call instead. Something in our voice gives greater insight into our mental state than our body language does. It turns out that vocal cues are more useful conveyers of emotion than facial expressions. Through a series of five experiments, Kraus found that participants could better guess their conversation partner’s emotions when the discussion was voice-only. These findings echo a 2017 paper by Yale School of Management’s Michael W. You’re less likely to talk over your conversation partner and more apt to wait to hear their reply.Īfter analyzing these results, the researchers question whether most of our meetings actually need video.

That’s because when you rely solely on voice communication, any silence is more noticeable. Video hindered the participants’ ability to detect changes in tone or rhythm of speech.īut the test subjects who had only audio capabilities did a better job of speaking in turn and contributing to conversations. That extra effort requires more mental bandwidth.Īcross a series of tests, Woolley and her colleagues found that people rely more on audio cues than visual ones to move a conversation forward. We need intense focus to absorb information and process facial expressions, tone, and body language. Video chat is harder for our brains to process than face-to-face communication. But studies have found that both become diminished over Zoom. Having both audio and visual cues seems like it would be the next best thing to in-person interactions. Our study underscores the importance of audio cues, which appear to be compromised by video access.” “This is because it leads to more unequal contribution to conversation and disrupts vocal synchrony. “We found that video conferencing can actually reduce collective intelligence,” says Anita Williams Woolley of Carnegie Mellon’s Tepper School of Business. Phone calls, on the other hand, are far superior both for conveying emotion and boosting group performance. Plus, the temptation to check your phone or answer emails on the side is often too great to resist.

Many of us have experienced Zoom meetings where people are interrupting or talking over each other. But staring at faces in boxes all day didn’t turn out to be the panacea we had hoped.īesides causing well-documented Zoom fatigue, researchers now say that video calls aren’t even that effective for communication. When the pandemic began, businesses, schools, and everyone between rushed to embrace video conferencing tools.

Want to know what is the most underappreciated technology of the last year-plus? The humble telephone.