the best way to make a profitable video? | EUROtoday

IIt's not simply your coiffure and garments (seen on digital camera) that must be taken care of to offer a great impression throughout a video assembly. The selection of your wallpaper influences your stage of credibility together with your interlocutors! This is what a research carried out by three British psychology researchers, Abi Cook, Paddy Ross and Meg Thompson, exhibits.

“From the first seconds of an encounter, we spontaneously deduce interferences about our character traits,” they write within the preamble. Gold The video background is a particular nonverbal factor, which clearly differentiates videoconferencing from face-to-face conferences. Video interactions are additionally characterised by an absence of physique language, thought-about to have a big affect on the primary impression,” clarify the authors.
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To research the affect of the background, they supplied 167 contributors completely different photographs of individuals in entrance of assorted wallpapers: house, library, white, “novelty” (a seal on the ice floe), blurred house, inexperienced crops.. The faces had been equally masculine or female, and the 2 facial expressions doable: pleased or impartial. Each participant, confronted with mixtures of faces and backgrounds completely different from the others, needed to reply the questions on a scale of 1 to 7: “Is this individual trustworthy? » and “Is this individual competent? »

Books, green plants and a smile!

Seventy-two different images in total were shown to the guinea pigs. The result ? To appear trustworthy and competent, the best background is a library full of books, just before green plants. The least rated are the visible home and the “original” {photograph}, right here a seal on the ice floe.

“This is consistent with previous research, which showed that virtual landscape backgrounds give the impression of a person with little expertise, while wallpapers showing the privacy of one's living room are considered unprofessional. »

But decor alone isn't enough for a first impression. The second area of ​​research therefore focused on facial features. Tip: smile! Smiling faces are systematically perceived more as self-confident people than neutral faces.
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Finally ; and it's a bit of a surprise, women are consistently rated as more serious than men – even if their background is the same. “Interestingly, with female faces, the “home” background did not demonstrate a loss of trust points,” the researchers point out. Could clichés finally die hard?

Here is the composite portrait of the video worker who inspires confidence

To recap, here is the composite portrait of the video worker who inspires confidence: it is a woman, who smiles, in front of a background of books or green plants.

While it is estimated that 75% of professional meetings will be held by video in 2024, “the results of this study have broad implications for businesses, public organizations and the general public,” write the authors.

In addition, the use of video during a recruitment process continues to progress, candidates “should be aware of the importance of their wallpaper in making a good first impression”. And this is even more important for men. Finally, if you don't have the choice of the “proper” wallpaper, don't panic: “smiling makes you overlook the primary dangerous impressions of confidence and competence linked to the wallpaper.” Phew!