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How to Battle Zoom Fatigue
How video chat entered the uncanny valley of sociality in the pandemic
A new research paper from Jeremy Bailenson, founding director of Stanford University’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab, and his team looks at Zoom fatigue from a psychological perspective. They narrowed it down to four main factors: 1) excessive eye contact, 2) constantly seeing oneself on video, 3) reduction of mobility (because of a need to stay in the frame), and 4) cognitive load.
Most intriguing is what Bailenson and his colleagues call the ZEF scale, or the Zoom exhaustion and fatigue scale, which includes questions like “How irritated do your eyes feel after videoconferencing?” and “How much do you tend to avoid social situations after videoconferencing?” In the extremely online pandemic era, those of us who rely on video chat to do our jobs are likely all too familiar with these particular feelings and emotions.
The concept of the uncanny valley is helpful here. Developed by Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori, the idea is that the more human a robot or artificial thing looks and acts, the more approachable it is—up to a point. After that, it drops sharply into what Mori called the uncanny valley, where we start to get uncomfortable.
