Video Call Glitches Evoke Uncanniness, Damage Consequential Life Outcomes (nature.com)
- Reference: 0180462401
- News link: https://slashdot.org/story/25/12/27/0142219/video-call-glitches-evoke-uncanniness-damage-consequential-life-outcomes
- Source link: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-09823-0
Researchers from Columbia, Cornell, and the University of Missouri-Kansas City [1]conducted ten studies examining glitches across thousands of participants and real-world parole hearing transcripts. The core finding is that glitches harm interpersonal judgments because they break the illusion of face-to-face contact, triggering what psychologists call "uncanniness" -- a strange, creepy, or eerie feeling typically associated with humanoid robots or CGI characters that look almost but not quite human.
In one experiment, participants watching a telehealth pitch chose to work with a health professional 77% of the time when no glitches occurred, but only 61% when brief freezes were present. The job interview studies found similar patterns, and when researchers examined 472 Kentucky parole hearings conducted over Zoom, they found that inmates were granted parole 60% of the time in glitch-free hearings versus 48% when transcripts indicated technical problems had occurred.
The researchers ruled out simpler explanations like mere disruption or comprehension difficulties. Glitches inserted during natural pauses in speech -- where no information was lost -- still damaged evaluations. And critically, when participants watched presentations where a shared screen froze rather than a human face, glitches had no effect on judgments at all. The uncanniness only emerged when the technology broke the simulation of sitting across from another person.
[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-09823-0
People are stupid and impatient (Score:2)
If you can't understand that some of what you're experiencing is flaws in the technology and make allowances for that, you're a big dumb-dumb.
This is what happens when you dumb people down to create low information voters, you wind up with a populace that doesn't know how anything works, including themselves.
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One of the dumbest features of midwits is that they think they control their impulses.
For most impulses, your awareness of them is borderline irrelevant to affecting outcomes that come as their result. We've established this beyond reasonable doubt in fMRI. Delusion machine that tells us that "our conscious mind is behind our decision making" is nothing but one small feature of our actual decision making machine.
Most of which has made the decision based on inputs before it ever hit your conscious mind. Agai
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Are you quite finished feeling superior, dipshit?
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Seems like an appropriate response to OP, who apparently also feels superior.
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Everyone is dumb, some of the time. Especially, when they call others "dumb." There is much more complexity to this issue, than just lack of intelligence.
You're right, we have a populace that doesn't know how things work. How many people know how an automatic transmission works? Electric circuits? Of course, computers and software. Not knowing how things work, doesn't make people dumb. It makes them human. Only a few people *do* know how things work. That's why we're engineers and others aren't.
"Low informa
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Maybe. Or maybe many millions of years of evolution has created brains that make snap judgements because it is more efficient to do so. Evolution has probably created a rule that if something looks odd, it likely is odd and ought to be treated as such. Much of this sort of processing isn't done at a conscious level - so overriding it is hard.
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> Maybe. Or maybe many millions of years of evolution has created brains that make snap judgements because it is more efficient to do so. Evolution has probably created a rule that if something looks odd, it likely is odd and ought to be treated as such. Much of this sort of processing isn't done at a conscious level - so overriding it is hard.
Then what in our evolutionary history caused us to have the [1]uncanny valley [simplypsychology.org]? About the only thing I can come up with is during our evolutionary rising, when we saw other humanoid beings on the plains of Africa, we had to determine if they were like us or not. And by us, I mean as pre-homo sapiens existing at that time.
If it wasn't something on the plains, was it another being we're not aware of?
[1] https://www.simplypsychology.org/uncanny-valley.html
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> Then what in our evolutionary history caused us to have the uncanny valley?
Diseases and dead people, for one. Belonging to a different tribe/culture/race (it's actually one of the reasons for ritual scars, later tattoos and haircuts, specific clothing, uniforms and so on).
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Everyone is a big dumb-dumb then, including you and me.
That's how human brains work, no amount of understanding will change that. You can work around the problem, like they do in aviation, using strict protocols, but even with that in mind, sometimes, "glitches" in radio communication have deadly consequences, including the worst accident in the history of aviation, the Tenerife disaster.
And the proper response to a technology that is flawed is to fix it, not have people learn how to deal with it. Education
Frequency And Duration? (Score:2)
How frequent were the glitches and what were their duration.
I can see persistent stuttering video causing me to have a negative perception. But, one or two Max Headroom moments in a half hour call will have zero effect.
A picture is worth zero words (Score:2)
Personally, I don't understand people's obsession with most video calls. I push back on them whenever possible. I am just fine with a phone call. I don't need nor want to see your face, and you don't need to see mine. Nor do I need all the hassle and wasted time that goes with it.... almost every time the others saying, can you hear me? And I out out of sync? I can't see you, etc; plus long links, waiting rooms, poor connections, software problems, bandwidth issues, entering passwords, other technical
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Two reasons for the prescribed time.
1) Many non-interactive Webinars are at heart advertising. The prescribed time is there to force engagement on you. The effect is similar to the glitch effect - by making you think of this as important, they hope to get more of your attention and perhaps think better of the topic.
2) Cheaper. If they give a prescribed time they do not have to pay for video storage and similar services. You can just throw up a time and use an existing video conferencing service you alrea
Smell a possible lawsuit or two (Score:2)
Can you claim that you were denied parole due to a technical glitch? Or that you lost a job prospect for the same reason? Can a care provider claim their ISP or similar is responsible for worsening patient outcomes?
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You can sue for anything. In case of something like parole, it would get thrown out immediately because of obvious qualified immunity.
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> Can you claim that you were denied parole due to a technical glitch? Or that you lost a job prospect for the same reason? Can a care provider claim their ISP or similar is responsible for worsening patient outcomes?
Oh, a couple years ago I had a job interview that someone insisted on doing on Zoom. The sole reason I lost the job? The camera was malpositioned. They told the recruiter it was "the worst interview we've ever had." The actual interview went well: It was the Zoom video part of the call that didn't.
Personally, I do judge people (Score:2)
from how they present themselves in video calls. Bad audio quality, bad framing (e.g. those people that occupy only the lower half of their screen), bad backgroubd removal (you don't have to show me your flat, but if the keying looks crappy, maybe you should have used a neutral wall instead), bad lighting (you don't have to do a 5 point lighting setup, but the image should not be noisy as fuck because it's much to dark or half of your face should not be severely overexposed),... all of that shows me that yo
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Yes. It's kind of like dressing for success. How you present yourself matters. And a decent internet connection doesn't have to be expensive anymore, even cellphone tethering provides good connection quality these days.
When I started working remotely, I went to the trouble to repaint my office (which used to be a bedroom) a neutral color that would look good on camera. I added lighting and wall art positioned to look good on camera. I don't mind if people's rooms are visible in the background, but at least
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> ... it's much to dark
Personally, I judge people on whether they can correctly use "too" when appropriate. ;)
It makes things so frustrating (Score:3)
It makes things so frustrating. My boss insists on using VOIP on his cell phone because according to him having a data only plan and using VOIP is cheaper than getting a regular mobile plan.
Most of the time I talk to him it's just constantly cutting out and the call quality just isn't the same. Even when it's behaving reasonably well it just has weird behaviours and often times you have to call two or three times before it really works.
I keep on telling him he needs to switch it out, but he's really stubborn about this.
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It's not the VOIP, it's your boss's specific plan or carrier. VOIP doesn't have to be choppy.
Just do audio calls (Score:2)
Nobody cares about seeing your face. No one at my work uses video in Zoom calls. All of our meetings are always audio only and we get things accomplished that way just fine.
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That's a company culture thing. My previous company was always audio only. My current company is much more interested in having people on camera. Audio only is fine for information-focused meetings. But for interviews and 1x1s, where the context is more personal, I insist on camera-on.
Oh, and audio-only doesn't eliminate glitches, if you've got a bad connection.
The simulation broke :o (Score:3)
Meetings, whether in person or virtual are next to useless. Time wasted with verbal with updates that could have been delivered in written form instead. In the end, they mostly function as status theater, giving managers the impression they are adding value, rather than delivering anything genuinely useful for the organization.
It's the new Dress for Success (Score:2)
Back when everything was in person, people counseled job seekers to "dress for success"--to wear clothes that would communicate a professional appearance. Interviewers would often not give a second chance to people who came in scruffily or too-casually dressed.
These days, if you don't know how to handle yourself on camera, or if your background isn't presentable, or your connection is glitchy, it's seen as not being prepared.
When I last interviewed for a job 3 years ago, I literally practiced video calls to
This doesn't surprise me. (Score:2)
It makes sense actually. If there are pauses and breaks in communication, even though you are understanding and empathic to the situation, it still leaves negative impressions on the overall communication itself.
It reminds me when I'm completely failing to communicate with someone that doesn't speak the same language as me. I give all strangers the benefit of the doubt that they are of average intelligence and education and can therefore usually communicate, but when there is a language or communications ba
Fake News (Score:2)
I recently had a perfectly normal video interview with this cheerful chap named Max Headroom
Sounds about right (Score:3)
When I compare the times when talking in-person with colleagues was the norm with today's almost complete shift to video-conferencing (at best... often people only use audio), I would definitely say this had a profound impact on how people interact - especially in the sense that those talking 2D images at the screen are mere company resources rather than human beings that you would want to share anything not-work-related with.
Don't Sell Yourself Short (Score:2)
You're not a company resource.
You're a tool.
I don't know I think you are more like a resource (Score:3)
A tool is something that the company values and maintains and intends to keep around as long as it can. A resource is something the company intends to use up and then discard.