How video call glitches may be messing with your life : NPR

Those annoying glitches that occasionally interrupt your video calls can be more than just an annoyance—they can derail your success in everything from job interviews to business proposals to legal cases.

That's because momentary video freezes, lags, or audio echoes can create an unpleasant “creepy” feeling that makes a viewer less likely to trust the person they're interacting with through face-to-face video, according to series of experiments published in Nature.

The findings suggest that people with poor internet access, such as those living in rural areas, may be suffering from the very technology that is touted as a way to ensure they have equal access to important services such as health care or job opportunities.

“If they don't have access to quality internet, it's likely to impact their likelihood of getting a positive result,” says Melanie Brooksone of the authors of the study at Columbia University.

She explains that as teleconferencing has become more common during the coronavirus pandemic, researchers have wondered how video quality might affect how people interact. So her colleague Jeff Johnson at the University of Missouri-Kansas City interviewed business people to find out whether they thought minor technical problems could hurt their virtual sales.

These executives insisted that short-term disruptions were not significant.

“We predicted that crashes might be a problem, and then we encountered this kind of consensus among ordinary users that no, they are in no way a problem,” says Jacqueline Rifkinco-author of the study from Cornell University.

To find out who was right, she and her colleagues conducted an experiment. Participants were told that they would be looking at a business proposal from a financial advisor. Half of them watched the video without any problems, while the rest watched the video that the researchers had modified so that the screen briefly froze during pauses in the salesperson's speech; the video was glitchy, but none of the actual information in the ad was lost. Viewers were asked to imagine that they were potential buyers and then asked how much they would like to work with that seller as a client.

“Just these little, tiny glitches during the conversation would significantly reduce or significantly reduce people's interest in working with the salesperson,” Brooks says.

This led researchers to wonder what other types of video interactions might be sabotaged by technical problems.

So they designed another experiment that included an interactive medical consultation about sunscreen. The actor playing the medical worker inserted interference during pauses in the conversation. After this, only 61% of viewers said they trusted the healthcare worker. That's lower than the 77% of viewers who believed health advice after interacting with the same actor on a call without a glitch.

Interview simulations also showed that people were less likely to want to hire someone whose video contained such glitches.

The researchers then collected data from 472 online hearings and found that problematic video calls in these real-life cases were associated with lower odds of parole.

“The presence of disruptions was associated with a 12 percentage point difference in how often prisoners gained freedom,” their report noted.

According to the researchers, all of these negative effects only occurred when glitches occurred while people were talking face-to-face. If someone was showing their computer screen to show a diagram or illustration, for example, the glitches didn't seem to bother the viewer too much.

Perhaps this is because modern video calls can create the feeling of talking to a person face-to-face that seems startlingly real, but a technical glitch suddenly shatters this illusion. Researchers already know from work done in computer animation and robotics that near-perfect but less-than-human simulators can frighten people, an effect known as the “uncanny valley.”

“Glitches serve as a stark reminder that the person looking you in the eye isn't actually in the room,” says Rifkin. “And that’s where this weirdness comes in, this creepiness. It's very unnoticeable. This creepy feeling is what causes all these negative consequences when applying for a job, getting medical advice, and wanting to be friends with someone you chat with online.”

The only potential remedy the researchers have found so far is to make a joke immediately after a technical failure. For example, if a financial advisor in a bad video simply said, “They say some internet connections are better than others. I think it's one of the others,” such a modest attempt at humor might go some way to redeeming the viewer's credibility.

The new research draws attention to an aspect of video communications that is typically left out of conversations about remote work and virtual meetings, he says. Stefano Puntoni at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.

“This is a very systematic and rigorous study of an important effect,” says Puntoni, who studies human behavior and artificial intelligence, as well as the adoption of new technologies. “It’s just amazing how much of an impact it has on things that Really important to people.”

The results of the parole hearings were particularly striking, he said.

“The outcome largely depends on whether they were lucky or unlucky, that is, they got or didn't understand the error in this hearing,” he says, “which is obviously very unfair.”

In his opinion, the main message is: “Make sure you have good communication.” And while people who think about the digital divide tend to categorize people as those with or without Internet access, he says, this research shows that the key point “seems to be how good is the Internet that you have?”