Winter 2023 Workshops

When: Mondays 10:00–11:30 a.m.
Where: Harper Center C06

Monday, February 27, 2023

Melanie Brucks 
Columbia Business School

"Perceptual Distortions Undermine Virtual Communication"

The COVID-19 pandemic engendered the widespread adoption of videoconferencing across numerous sectors, including healthcare, sales, education, and hiring. Although videocalls offer many benefits, this paper examines a novel issue introduced by this communication medium: perceptual distortions, in which audiovisual information is unnaturally warped. We test our predictions in the empirical context of glitches, or small and fleeting errors like lags and freezes in audio or video. Although consumers and