On online floating faces: Understanding people in COVID times
Interacting with people online is like getting a song’s lyrics without music. These are — more or less — the words that Heather MacIntosh, one of my professors in psychotherapy, recently used to define the difficulty of connecting more deeply with people during online interactions. On video-communication apps, she argued, we often feel apart despite hours spent in talking. We understand the words — the lyrics — but we don’t feel the music.
These words impressed me and made me wonder about what music exactly is during social interactions. What if at least part of the answer is that body language is what we miss out on?
Non-verbal communication has been the focus of my research activity for almost a decade now. How people look at each other when they are interacting, for example, can reveal important things on what is running under the table. A mutual glance of complicity between two people says a lot about their mutual interest, as much as how a team member looks at their boss reveals their respect for them — or lack of it.
We constantly use this language of the eyes to communicate with others, often without even realizing it. Yet, in the online world of these pandemic times, I — like many other researchers in non-verbal communication — find myself questioning my scientific knowledge. How does non-verbal communication work when it is almost entirely online?
Some time ago, before the pandemic, I published the results of one of my research projects on how paying more attention to someone helps us better understand their personality — how outgoing or shy they are, for example. In this study, my colleagues and I showed our research participants short video interviews of people while measuring where they were looking in the video at every point in time. For example, we could tell when they were looking at the interviewee’s eyes, mouth, or body, or at other objects in the room. We found that the more our participants looked at the interviewees, the better they were able to gauge the type of person they were.
This finding is cool because it shows that we can improve our understanding of others by paying more attention to them. This can be undoubtedly useful in various situations, from job interviews to first dates. However, a particularly intriguing aspect of our findings is that our analyses showed that looking at the entire person improved personality understanding. That is, looking at the interviewee’s body (e.g., torso and legs) was as important as looking at their face (e.g., eyes and mouth).
Other researchers confirmed these findings in multiple interesting ways. For example, further research on non-verbal communication keeps discovering fundamental ways in which people unconsciously sync their bodies while interacting, with this body synchronicity supporting social bonding and adding an essential feeling of togetherness to human social interactions.
But what happens in online interactions? On video-communication apps, we often see only other people’s floating faces and not their bodies. Thus, we probably lose important pieces of information without even knowing it. If looking at others’ bodies is an integral part of how we understand their personality, then interacting only with others’ faces diminishes our ability to fully understand other people. If syncing our bodies with others’ is an essential aspect of social bonding, we lose the opportunity to connect with them in meaningful ways by looking only at their faces.
In other words, if bodies are an essential medium for us to understand others, then interacting only with online floating faces is like trying to solve a puzzle without having all the pieces. After video calls, most people feel exhausted: But maybe it’s just because our brains are constantly trying to read insufficient non-verbal information and get drained in the effort!
In sum, as I am preparing for the next online meeting or psychotherapy session, I am simply wondering whether we should all move our cameras far enough that our entire body — and not only our face — is visible to our interactive partners. Bodies may not be all the music we need to feel more deeply connected to others but could at least offer the rhythm that helps us sync on the same grounds.
Written in December 2020.
