Let me begin by saying that while there are plenty of good reasons for turning your camera on—providing an additional communicative layer with gestures and expressions, bonding with your colleagues and collaborators, and driving yourself to engage (and not multitask), among others—I am going to focus on a more selfish reason you might do it:
It will make you seem more important and influential.
I had this realization while reading a passage in Robert Cialdini’s revelatory Pre-Suasion, which observes the tendency of people to assume that what is focal is causal. In other words, people will overestimate the impact and influence of what is visible.
Cialdini illustrates this through a study conducted by Dr. Shelley Taylor, a social psychologist at UCLA:
Taylor and her colleagues conducted a series of experiments in which observers watched and listened to conversations that had been scripted carefully so that neither discussion partner contributed more than the other. Some observers watched from a perspective that allowed them to see the face of one of the parties over the shoulder of the other, while other observers saw both faces from the side, equally All the observers were then asked to judge who had more influence in the discussion, based on tone, content, and direction. The outcomes were always the same: whomever’s face was more visible was judged to be more causal.
Robert Cialdini, Pre-Suasion (55)
As applied to our new world of virtual meetings, the principle is straightforward: if you are visible to other meeting participants, they will view you as being more “causal,” or influential, to the outcomes of the meeting, as compared with those attendees who choose to leave their video off.
Now, there’s a major potential downside here, which is that (the perception of) influence is not always a good thing. Plenty of meetings have negative or unpopular outcomes. If, in actuality, you had little control or influence in such a meeting, then there’s no reason to actively foster a perception that you did. No one wants to be held accountable for outcomes that they had nothing to do with! (This is also true in those cases where you were no more or less responsible than others involved.) So, you would be better served turning your camera off during any unpopular or controversial meetings, lest you be associated with the resulting fallout.
But what about other meetings? Not every meeting has such high stakes! Reoccurring status meetings and check-in meetings strike me as a great opportunity to turn your camera on and claim some influence. Your contributions to long-term projects will inherently seem more causal and impactful simply by virtue of clicking that camera icon in your Zoom or Teams window. This is especially true for brainstorms or discussions, where repetition and rephrasing, often reworking ideas in new words, are commonplace. Assuming that the group is exploring a good idea, do you really want to leave influence on the table? Turn that camera on!
Now, I’m not telling you to brashly claim credit for the ideas of others. No flicking your camera on momentarily to mindlessly repeat someone else’s idea, hoping to leverage an unconscious psychological bias to your advantage. But there’s no getting around the fact that it’s incredibly easily to take advantage of this bias. Individually, I can offer no remedy for avoiding the effect of what is focal is causal in those camera half-on/half-off meetings we’ve all been having.
However, there is a remedy at the organizational level. Meeting organizers can insist on all-cameras-on or all-cameras-off for virtual meetings, as dictated by the ability of participants (either situationally or technologically) to turn their cameras on. Or perhaps, a working (and activated) camera is a prerequisite for participation; anyone “calling in” can only observe, not participate.
If these “all-or-nothing” solutions seem too inflexible, another option would be to set a “tripwire ratio” of cameras-on to cameras-on participants that tips the meeting to all-cameras-off. Say your tripwire ratio is 3:1—for every three cameras-on participants, there is one camera-off participant. If the ratio holds (or is higher!), proceed with the meeting. But if the ratio slips below 3:1, the organizer asks whether anyone else is able to go camera-on and, if there is not, asks everyone to turn their cameras off.
Is this all a little extreme, though? After all, there are still benefits to cameras-on meetings, such as improved communication and group bonding, regardless of whether all participants are visible. Organizers must wrestle with whether these group-wide benefits outweigh the potential downsides of misallocating influence amongst meeting participants.
In the meantime, dare I suggest you turn that camera on?
Taylor Coe 