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The problem with video calls is that they’re unnatural and just not fun, Jeremy Bailenson, founding director of Stanford University’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab, wrote in an Opinion piece for The Wall Street Journal last April.
During in-person meetings, people aren’t staring into your face from a close distance — some might be typing up notes, some might be reading. But video calls disrupt that natural rhythm, forcing everyone logged in to stare at each other, a phenomenon known as “hyper gaze.”
“From an evolutionary standpoint, if somebody was very close to you and staring right at you, this meant you were going to mate or get in a fight,” Mr. Bailenson said in an interview (over video, though no journalists were harmed in the writing of this article). And constantly being on high alert creates stress.
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