Sorry, but your glitchy connection might have cost you that job
- Reference: 1764868755
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2025/12/04/glitchy_video_calls_research/
- Source link:
Since the Covid-19 pandemic and associated lockdowns made video meetings more commonplace, questions remain about how effectively they replace face-to-face meetings. However, around a third of online meetings are hit by connectivity issues, including frozen screens, lag, and distorted audio.
Columbia University assistant professor Melanie Brucks and colleagues conducted an experiment in which more than 3,000 participants watched job interview recordings in a setting designed to replicate a video call. Calls that included glitches were less likely to result in a recommendation for hire compared to those without. Meanwhile, among 497 participants who listened to healthcare advice, 77 percent reported confidence in working with the healthcare professional during a glitch-free call, but only 61 percent had the same confidence when the call had connection issues.
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The team also studied real-world data from 472 online court hearings. They found that glitchy connections reduced the chances of an individual being granted parole.
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[4]Reported in Nature this week , the study notes that audiovisual glitches break the illusion of a face-to-face meeting, damaging interpersonal judgments.
The authors argued that distorted faces, misaligned audio and visual cues, and choppy movements resulting from technical failures can create an "uncanniness, a strange, creepy or eerie feeling."
[5]John Henry still leading the race vs AI in customer service
[6]Space telescopes are being photobombed by satellites, and the problem is slated to get much worse
[7]Dutch study finds teen cybercrime is mostly just a phase
[8]One-fifth of the jobs at your company could disappear as AI automation takes off
"As the uncanniness of a glitch increases, so does its negative effect on interpersonal judgments," the paper said. "Furthermore, audiovisual glitches undermine interpersonal judgments only in video calls that simulate face-to-face interaction, showing that the negative effect produced by glitches goes beyond mere disruptiveness, comprehension difficulties and negative attributions."
Some might think the resources of the tech industry could eliminate such problems and their resulting impacts in the real world. But priorities seem to lie elsewhere.
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The study's authors noted that older technologies like phone calls have fewer glitches now, but keep getting displaced by those that require more bandwidth. New conferencing methods such as 3D group functionality and VR will have even higher bandwidth demands.
"This is the nature of technological innovation: as infrastructure capacity expands, we simultaneously develop more demanding applications that strain these very improvements," the authors wrote. "Moreover, as communication technologies often aim to further heighten social presence, simulating real life through augmented and virtual realities, glitches might become even more uncanny. As such, these cutting-edge environments could inadvertently be increasingly fertile grounds for glitches and uncanniness." ®
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[4] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-09823-0
[5] https://www.theregister.com/2025/12/03/john_henry_ai_customer_service/
[6] https://www.theregister.com/2025/12/03/space_telescopes_photobombed_leo_comms_satellites/
[7] https://www.theregister.com/2025/12/01/dutch_study_teen_cybercrime/
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[10] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
"The study's authors noted that older technologies like phone calls have fewer glitches now, but keep getting displaced by those that require more bandwidth."
"Fewer" glitches? They must be talking about cell phones and/or VOIP calls. In the 70s, 80s and 90s regular phones did not have "glitchy" connections, except for trans-oceanic calls. Progress marches ever onward and upward.
Or "this line quality is really poor, I'll call you back" if you got a dodgy circuit. Or crossed lines.
Every technology has its issues, we just forget them when we stop using it!
Really? Because I remember some. Sure, you could blame a few of them on the user, for example all the things that could go wrong with the short-range wireless phones that communicated with a base station, which usually worked but were subject to various signal and quality problems. I suppose you could tell everyone to only use the kind that has a wire all the way from your ear to the other person's.
Sometimes, though, the phone lines themselves had noise or interference, and rarely a call would drop, hence the common joke of hanging up on someone and getting a call back from them assuming that you had been cut off, one that wouldn't make sense if lines were always perfect. A lot like video calls today. I have them all the time with international users, and sometimes I have them with users on three continents, and they work so often that we don't bother having a backup procedure. But sometimes something goes wrong, and quite often, it's a problem with the user, not the service. I can't blame the video platform when someone insists on having video on when they've got a rural DSL connection.
Glitchy calls do not inspire confidence
You certainly do not get the full experience of an in person meeting over the phone, whether an old copper land line connection or a glitchy VOIP call. On the BBC's Today program, none of the in studio guests glitches (although some of them are quite obnoxious), but with phone in interviewees there seems to be at least one a day that has to be dropped due to a poor connection. If that is a similar rate to, say, Probation Service calls between Officers and Offenders, then that is a serious problem for the CJ system.
I'm too glitchy for my job, too glitchy
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