Body Language Availability in Videoconferencing

Abstract

Videoconferencing (or video chat) is now a cheap and very widely-available mode of communication. However, despite its convenience, videoconferencing is still underutilized in business settings where it has the potential to save organizations much in terms of productivity and financial costs. Much research has been conducted regarding video-mediated communication for business use. But, to date, the role of the visibility of bodily non-verbal cues on communication and perception is an aspect of videoconferencing research that has had little consideration. This thesis was undertaken with the aim of investigating the effect of body language availability on various factors that may influence usage or uptake of videoconferencing for business-type meetings. Four empirical, quantitative studies emulated the various types of discussions that business-type users would have with remote team members, associates, or other individuals with whom they conduct official meetings (such as in negotiations between companies and co-operative team decision-making tasks.) The first two studies investigated the participants’ perception of their conversation partners, and the latter two experiments included the participants’ perception of their own ability to project the desired impression of themselves to their conversation partners. In Study 1, participants were asked to discuss a negotiation task and an idea generation task, with body language available or not available depending on the condition. In Study 2, participants watched a video of an actor presenting a business proposal either with honest body language cues or dishonest body language cues, either in an eye-to-eye camera angle or an off-side camera angle, and either with body language available or with body language not available. The findings from t he first two studies showed that body language availability interacted with task type, camera angle, and gender to affect ratings on trust and social presence. In the latter two studies, the mirror component of participant’s perception of others was added: that is, the perception of being perceived. Additionally, following the findings of Study 2 in which gender differences were found, gender was included in the independent variables of the latter two studies. In Study 3, participants in same-sex (m/m or f/f) or mixed-sex (m/f) dyads were asked to discuss an intellective task (decision-making task with an objectively correct answer), either with body language available or not available. In Study 4, this was extended by asking participants to control their own body language availability, and with the addition of a judgment task (decision-making task with no objectively correct answer.) These studies showed that body language availability, task type, participant gender, and (conversation) partner gender affected ratings of trust, social presence, dominance self-efficacy, and impression management self-efficacy. The implications of the findings are that it is important to consider videoconferencing with body language available as different from when the technology is used without body language available. They suggest that body language availability does not have a simple effect, such as ‘more is good’ and ‘less is bad’. Participants’ perceptions of their interactions with their conversation partner appear more nuanced and complex than that, and body language availability in videoconferencing interacts with other factors such as task type and gender to influence those perceptions. Gender itself was found to have a very strong effect on users’ perceptions of the interactions, technology, and of their conversation partners, and this included both the participants’ own gender as well as the partners’ gender. This may indicate that different groups of users may respond differently to body language information and use body language differently. There are many venues for future studies in examining the role of body language in videoconferencing, including investigating groups of more than two individuals, investigating gender as social construct versus biological sex, and investigating user perceptions of body language availability in videoconferencing in different cultures.