Eye to Eye: Video Conferencing and the Perception of Consciousness
Why do we feel so self-conscious when we’re live on camera?
As many people adjust to working at home during the Covid-19 pandemic, they’re learning that a live video conference with colleagues and clients can be strangely unsettling. On camera, people become hyper aware of facial expressions, posture, fidgety movements, and even breathing patterns.
“I’ve never been self-conscious of my forehead size until all these Zoom videos emphasize it,” writes one Twitter user.
“I brush my teeth before Zoom calls,” tweets another. “I’m not sure why.”
Others are confused about where they should look while video conferencing. The camera may be several inches above the image of the person on screen, so it is difficult to make eye contact. In a meeting with multiple users, eye contact with teammates seems impossible.
The self-conscious feeling and lack of eye contact may result in a conversation that feels artificial or surreal. We know we’re talking to real people, but we also know we’re looking at a mere representation of humans made from flickering light and color.
At the core of these swirling perceptions is the question of consciousness and a sense of self and others. Who am I when I’m on screen? Who, or what, are those other people? And how do I know?
Real People Make Eye Contact
In a live video conference, our viewing behavior changes, according to a recent study at Florida Atlantic University [1]. The researchers found that when people believed they were watching a live video call, they were more likely to make eye contact with the on-screen image of the speaker. When study participants they were viewing a recorded video, they looked away more often or were more likely to gaze at other parts of the screen, such as the speaker’s mouth.
Making eye contact involves both psychological and social influences, according to the researchers. People learn through social conditioning that making eye contact is a sign of respect or attention. This social norm may be highlighted in a business context. “People may intend to signal that they are paying more attention to a speaker by fixating on their face or eyes during a conversation,” the researchers wrote.
Yet, eye contact that is held too long or too steady may also be interpreted as a sign of aggression, the study noted. For that reason, people tend to regularly break eye contact and look elsewhere before returning their gaze to the speaker’s face.
But, when viewing a recorded video of a speaker, the participants of the study looked at the speaker’s mouth for assistance in decoding the message, according to researchers. The reason? They believed that no one was watching them.
In philosophy, this shift in behavior is a matter of phenomenology, or “study of structures of consciousness as experienced from the first-person point of view” [2].
The Gaze
The practice of making eye contact represents a desire to acknowledge the consciousness in the person we’re interacting with. According to French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, this recognition of the “self” of the other person happens instantly and instinctively [3]. We perceive the other as an object in the world, just like all the other objects in our perceptual field, but simultaneously, we perceive something else that is transcendent, something that identifies the other as a conscious person.
Coincidentally, Sartre’s ideas play out in a real-life experiment about consciousness and sense of self in animals called the mirror test, first devised by a New York professor named Gordon Gallup in 1970. Animals are presented with a mirror to see if they recognize the image as a reflection of themselves as unique individuals or just as an image of a random animal. Only a few mammals have passed the test, including chimpanzees, dolphins, elephants, and, of course, Homo sapiens.
So we humans understand ourselves as conscious individuals in the world, but we also recognize that others have consciousness, and that’s what causes us to worry about how we look to others, according to Sartre. He describes this as “the look” or “the gaze.” In Sartre’s view, we are not constantly thinking about our “self” when we are interacting with the world; instead, our attention is directed at the things we are interacting with. But when a person looks (or gazes) at us, we instantly become aware that the person sees us, all of us, our bodies which appear as object in the other’s view and our individual consciousness, also. Suddenly, we feel self-conscious and possibly embarrassed.
Video Conferencing and Shame
How does Sartre’s philosophy apply to video conferencing? First, when looking at the image on the screen, we try to ascertain the image’s status as a human consciousness by making eye contact and by receiving eye contact from the image. Secondly, the recognition of the consciousness of the person on screen makes us self-conscious about how we might appear to them. What we look like, what we’re doing, whether the background is acceptable — all of these are potential sources of embarrassment, or as Sartre puts it, shame.
Nobody is concerned about their appearance or their actions while they are watching a recorded video, as the Florida Atlantic University study shows. It takes the presence of another consciousness, even perceived through the screen of a video call, to evoke our sense of self.
[1] Michael J. Kleiman and Elan Barenholtz, “Perception of Being Observed by a Speaker Alters Gaze behavior,” Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics, 2020. DOI: 10.3758/s13414–020–01981–9
[2] David Woodruff Smith, “Phenomenology,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2018 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2018/entries/phenomenology.
[3] Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: A Phenomenological Essay on Ontology, trans. by Hazel E. Barnes (New York: Washington Square Press, 1956).
