There's a specific kind of social pressure that lives inside a video call. You log on, everyone else's faces appear in little boxes on your screen, and somewhere in the back of your mind, a quiet negotiation starts. Do I turn the camera on? Is my background good enough? Do I look tired?
Some people resolve that negotiation by simply leaving the camera off. And if you've ever sat in a meeting watching a grid of black squares with names in white text, you've probably wondered what's going on behind them. Disengagement? Bad Wi-Fi? Just not bothered? The answer, according to a growing body of psychology research, is more complicated than any of those explanations, and more human.
The Strange Effect of Seeing Yourself
One of the stranger things about video calls is that they give you a real-time view of yourself. When you're in a room with someone, you don't watch your own face react to what they're saying. On a Zoom call, you do. Constantly. And that turns out to matter quite a lot.
Researchers have identified what they call mirror anxiety as a key driver of video call fatigue. The experience of seeing your own self-image on screen triggers increased self-focused attention and, with it, negative affect. It's the psychological equivalent of having a mirror positioned directly in front of you for the entire duration of a conversation, which for most people would feel deeply uncomfortable.
Gender and Personality Differences
A study of 613 adults found that virtual meeting fatigue was nearly 15% higher for women than for men, and that this gap was significantly mediated by facial dissatisfaction. Research has also found that introverts experience seeing and managing their self-image on video calls as significantly more cognitively demanding than extroverts do, and that extroverts felt less exhausted after video calls partly because they experienced less mirror anxiety.
Experimental Evidence
A four-week experiment involving 103 participants and more than 1,400 observations, published in the Journal of Applied Psychology, found that people who had cameras on, or were told to keep them on, reported more fatigue than those who didn't use the camera. None of this means that turning off the camera is always the right call, or that there are no real costs to it.
What This Actually Means for How We Run Meetings
The instinct in most workplaces is to treat the camera as a proxy for professionalism — if you're on, you're present; if you're off, you're somewhere else mentally. But that's a fairly shallow reading of what the research is actually showing. This isn't a signal of disengagement. More often than not, it's a person who showed up anyway, doing the best they can with what they've got, and quietly hoping nobody makes a thing out of it.
