If you didn't get your dream job, you might be able to blame your internet provider. Technical glitches on video calls in healthcare, job interviews, and parole hearings can affect real-world decisions, a study has found. The researchers suggest new technologies may even be making the problem worse.
Since the Covid-19 pandemic and associated lockdowns made video meetings more commonplace, questions remain about how effectively they replace face-to-face meetings. However, around a third of online meetings are hit by connectivity issues, including frozen screens, lag, and distorted audio.
Columbia University assistant professor Melanie Brucks and colleagues conducted an experiment in which more than 3,000 participants watched job interview recordings in a setting designed to replicate a video call. Calls that included glitches were less likely to result in a recommendation for hire compared to those without. Meanwhile, among 497 participants who listened to healthcare advice, 77 percent reported confidence in working with the healthcare professional during a glitch-free call, but only 61 percent had the same confidence when the call had connection issues.
The team also studied real-world data from 472 online court hearings. They found that glitchy connections reduced the chances of an individual being granted parole.
Reported in Nature this week, the study notes that audiovisual glitches break the illusion of a face-to-face meeting, damaging interpersonal judgments.
The authors argued that distorted faces, misaligned audio and visual cues, and choppy movements resulting from technical failures can create an "uncanniness, a strange, creepy or eerie feeling."
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"As the uncanniness of a glitch increases, so does its negative effect on interpersonal judgments," the paper said. "Furthermore, audiovisual glitches undermine interpersonal judgments only in video calls that simulate face-to-face interaction, showing that the negative effect produced by glitches goes beyond mere disruptiveness, comprehension difficulties and negative attributions."
Some might think the resources of the tech industry could eliminate such problems and their resulting impacts in the real world. But priorities seem to lie elsewhere.
The study's authors noted that older technologies like phone calls have fewer glitches now, but keep getting displaced by those that require more bandwidth. New conferencing methods such as 3D group functionality and VR will have even higher bandwidth demands.
"This is the nature of technological innovation: as infrastructure capacity expands, we simultaneously develop more demanding applications that strain these very improvements," the authors wrote. "Moreover, as communication technologies often aim to further heighten social presence, simulating real life through augmented and virtual realities, glitches might become even more uncanny. As such, these cutting-edge environments could inadvertently be increasingly fertile grounds for glitches and uncanniness." ®