Those pesky glitches that occasionally interrupt your video calls may be more than just an annoyance — they could undermine your success in everything from job interviews to sales pitches to court cases.
That’s because brief video freezes, lags, or audio echoes can create an unpleasant “uncanny” sensation that makes a viewer less likely to trust the person they’re interacting with through a face-to-face video connection, according to a series of experiments published in Nature.
The findings suggest that people with subpar internet access, like those in rural areas, may be getting dinged by the very technology that’s been lauded as a way of ensuring that they have equal access to important services like medical care or job opportunities.
“If they don’t have access to good-quality internet, that’s likely going to affect the likelihood of them getting a positive result,” says Melanie Brucks, one of the study’s authors at Columbia University.
She explains that as teleconferences became more common during the coronavirus pandemic, researchers wondered how video quality might affect people’s interactions. So her colleague Jeff Johnson at the University of Missouri-Kansas City did interviews with businesspeople to see whether they thought that small technical problems might be hurting their virtual sales pitches.
Those executives insisted that the momentary disruptions were inconsequential.
“We were predicting that glitches might be a problem, and then coming up against this sort of consensus from everyday users that no, there’s no way they’re a problem,” says Jacqueline Rifkin, a coauthor on the study from Cornell University.
To see who was right, she and her colleagues did an experiment. Participants were told that they’d be watching a sales pitch from a financial advisor. Half of them saw a video without problems, while the rest watched one that had been altered by the researchers so that the screen briefly froze during the pauses in the salesperson’s speech; the video was glitchy but none of the actual information in the sales pitch got lost. Viewers were told to imagine that they were a potential customer, and then later were asked how much they’d want to work with that salesperson as a client.
“Just having these small, tiny glitches during the call greatly reduced or significantly reduced people’s interest in working with the salesperson,” says Brucks.
That made the researchers wonder what other kinds of video call interactions might get sabotaged by technical snags.
So they designed another experiment that involved an interactive health consultation about sunscreen. The actor playing a healthcare worker would insert glitches during pauses when they were speaking. Afterwards, only 61% of viewers said they trusted the health worker. That’s lower than the 77% of viewers who trusted the health advice after interacting with the same actor during a glitch-free call.
A simulated job interview similarly showed that people were less likely to want to hire someone whose video had these glitches.
Then the researchers gathered data from 472 online court hearings, and found that problematic video calls in these real-world cases were associated with a lower chance of getting parole.
“The presence of glitches was associated with a 12 percentage-point difference in how often incarcerated individuals regained their freedom,” their report notes.
All of these negative effects only happened when the glitches occurred as people were speaking face-to-face, the researchers say. If someone was sharing their computer screen to, for example, show a chart or an illustration, glitches didn’t seem to bother the viewer as much.
That may be because modern video calls can create a sense of speaking to a person face-to-face that feels startlingly real, but a technical hiccup abruptly shatters that illusion. Researchers already know from work done in the worlds of computer animation and robotics that almost-perfect-but-not-quite human simulants can creep people out, an effect known as the uncanny valley.
Glitches offer a jarring reminder that the person making eye contact with you is not actually in the room, says Rifkin. “And that’s where that strangeness, that eeriness comes in. It’s very subtle. This creepy feeling that arises is what’s responsible for all these negative effects on hiring and taking medical advice and wanting to be friends with someone that you’re chatting with online.”
The only potential remedy that the researchers have found so far is cracking a quick joke right after a technical glitch. For example, if the financial advisor in a glitchy video simply said, “They say that some internet connections are better than others. I guess this one’s one of the others,” that modest attempt at humor could somewhat repair the damage to the viewer’s trust.
This new research draws attention to an aspect of video communications that generally gets left out of talk about remote work and virtual meetings, says Stefano Puntoni at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.
“It’s a very systematic and careful investigation of an important effect,” says Puntoni, who studies human behavior and AI as well as the adoption of new technologies. “It’s just surprising, the extent to which this affects things that are really important to people.”
In his view, the findings on parole hearings were particularly striking.
“The outcome is significantly shaped by whether they were lucky or unlucky, meaning they got or didn’t get the glitch in that hearing,” he says, “which is obviously very unfair.”
To him, the main take-home message is this: “Make sure you have a good connection.” And while people thinking about digital inequality typically classify people as being either with or without access to the internet, he says, this study shows that a key point “seems to be, how good is the internet that you have?”
Copyright 2025 NPR
