Tele-trust is more than than meets the eye
Image by Editor B via Flickr
Having sat through my share of faculty meetings listening to colleagues argue for hours about matters as crucial to our educational mission as whether or not exact vote counts should be included in the minutes from the last meeting–OK, fine, I admit it, I didn’t just listen but bloviated right along–anything that might change how these bad-coffee fueled argument-fests are conducted would seem worthy of support.
According to the Chronicle of Higher Education fundamental changes are indeed coming to faculty meetings from advances in videoconference technology. Faculty will no longer have to be physically present at the event.
The days of face-to-face faculty meetings might soon come to an end. Colleges with several campuses are embracing videoconferencing systems for a range of faculty and staff meetings, to save money and fuel by reducing trips. And more academic meetings now offer the option of attending virtually, using video streams.
This way, faculty could drink good coffee lovingly brewed at home or office. But as with all things technological, there will be unintended consequences to these changes. Transitioning from knowing one’s colleagues through actual, however annoying, contact to sharing a simulated “telepresence” will change the interpersonal experience and emotional bonds between the participants. Understanding more about these inevitable compromises will help people make the most of simulated attendance at a meeting.
Anyone who has tried a videoconference or watched a lecture on a screen in an overflow room knows that the experience is not the same as being there—there’s a loss of social cues the camera doesn’t capture, and it can be a little harder to pay attention because of the sense of distance created. But is it good enough for routine university business? And can video links be the future of academic meetings, and even classroom teaching?
The article goes on to focus on trust as the potentially crucial difference that needs to be managed in order to make telepresence more like actual presence.
Research shows that videoconference meetings just aren’t as good as in-person gatherings when it comes to building trust.
The research cited studied transaction trust in which pairs of experimental subjects would make more money if they trusted each other to the end, or either one could bail out sooner and get less money just for themselves. Trusting your partner to the end meant more money for both. The important finding was that those who partnered in person made more money than those who were telepresent to each other.
While the transaction trust studied was all about people focussed on earning money, something typically absent from most academic meetings, it is still a curious finding. The explanation offered for the diminished trust is that telepresence blocks the unconscious eye-contact signals of trust that flow back-and-forth when humans interact: I catch your eye, you catch mine and we signal to each other we can trust the message we are sharing.
The suggested fix is to have telepresence robots (e.g., see this posting by Aaron Saenz on the Singularity Hub for additional examples) or eventual 3-d hologram representations at the meeting. Clearly this is a wicked cool technological solution. But it might be misplaced. Eye contact is not all there is to building transaction trust and transaction trust is but a very small part of the kind of interpersonal trust that really does grow among faculty members over longer periods of time. Trust is still not understood well enough to be subject to a clever technological solution. For example, a recent review from Current Directions in Psychological Science
Considering the centrality of trust in relationships across the lifespan, one might expect the topic would have received widespread theoretical and empirical attention. Surprisingly, it has not.
One thing we do know is that trust cannot grow in a vacumn. The more that is at stake, the more trust can grow. When there is less risk, more distance, there is less possibility for trust. The absence of risk is not trustworthy, it is simply boring. For example, I’d trust someone I drove with to play a video racing game, but not the other way around; no matter how high someone scored on Need for Speed:Most Wanted, I’m not going to comfortably get in the car with them. When there’s nothing at stake, when there’s no possibility of being dropped, you can’t learn to trust the person holding you.
And finally, perhaps the biggest unintended consequence comes from the Clothing Don’ts section of Larry Kless’ Weblog: Videoconferencing Best Practices when he advises people in a videoconference to avoid tweed jackets.
The horror! Can you imagine faculty meetings without tweed sportcoats!!
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