Sound reliable, look relatable: Behavioural science hacks for video meetings

How are people judging you when you appear in online meetings? Do they think you are honest? Reliable? Persuasive?

With a majority of business taking place through online conferencing, it’s important to take stock of how you are coming across in meetings, presentations and pitches. You might be inadvertently signalling you can’t be trusted. 

Where to look

Where is it best to look when speaking, and is this different when you are in listen-mode?

“Zoom fatigue” seems to be a real thing, and researchers suggest it has a lot to do with eye contact. 

Imagine yourself in a crammed, pre-COVID elevator. Where did you look? Probably at your shoes, phone or the elevator’s progress display — anywhere but the faces of the people riding with you. 

Stanford’s Jeremy Bailenson says this is our natural behaviour when a nonverbal norm is violated. In this case, because a comfortable interpersonal distance has been threatened, we feel less comfortable making eye-contact.

In a Zoom setting, Bailenson suggests, where faces are close-up and eye-contact is demanded, our sense of personal space is compromised. It makes all this face gazing uncomfortable, overly familiar and fatiguing.

Plus, the camera is usually sitting atop your computer, so looking down the barrel means people you are speaking to may think you’re looking at them, but you’re actually not. When your eyes drift down to your screen so you can see them (better for you), this breaks the level of perceived eye-contact (worse for them). Your poor brain gets exhausted trying to work out where to look.

This means it can be very difficult to look like you’re looking at the people you are meeting with. This can be a problem, as not looking at the camera can dent perceptions of your trustworthiness.

How to sound

Not only do you need to focus on where you look, but how you sound.

Falling intonation, where the pitch of your voice drops at the end of a word, strengthens perceptions of certainty and honesty, whereas “speakers are perceived to be unreliable (i.e., uncertain or dishonest) if they pronounce words with a rising intonation, less intensity at the beginning of the word, a slower speech rate, and more variable pitch and speech rate.”

Lengthy pauses have been correlated with lower credibility, whereas being slightly breathy tends to signal a more relaxed and trustworthy speaker.

Relationship between sight and sound

Researchers have also looked at how rate of speech combined with eye-gaze impacts perceived trustworthiness, specifically of women. 

The study is interesting because it investigated the simultaneous impact of how we speak and where we look, whereas many other studies assess these two aspects of presentation separately.

The researchers hypothesised that a speaker who looks at the camera more (high gaze) and speaks more slowly (slow speech) would be considered more credible and persuasive.

Instead, they found it was looking more and speaking faster that bolstered credibility. Talking slow and not looking at the camera damaged perceived trustworthiness.

Seven steps to sounding (and looking) reliable

1. Speak more quickly with fewer pauses. If you’re a slow talker like I am, compensate with lots of eye contact by looking at the camera.

2. If you struggle to look down the barrel of your camera, speak faster. The worst thing you can do is speak slowly while not looking like you’re looking at your audience.

3. Speak with falling intonation, where your pitch drops at the end of sentences. This will make what you say sound more like statements than questions, enhancing your audience’s belief in what you say.

4. To manage audience fatigue, provide them with moments of eye-contact respite. Have them look at a prop you hold, or image-based slide on screen, or get them jotting down thoughts in moments of personal reflection.

5. Turn off the self-view so you are not distracted by self-appraisal.

6. When you are the listener, break the trance to enhance your engagement. Try jotting down notes and intermittently look away from their eyes, seemingly deep in thought.

7. Sit a little further away and/or reduce the screen size so looking at people feels less intense.