The growing number of video chat users includes socially anxious people, but it is not known how video chat interfaces affect their interpersonal interactions. In our first study, we use a get-to-know-you task to show that when video feedback of oneself is disabled, higher social anxiety is associated with more public self-awareness, use of 2nd person pronouns, and experienced anxiety. Higher social anxiety was linked to discussing more topics, but discussing more topics only elicited higher self-disclosure and trust when social anxiety was low. In our second study, we assess these same effects using a presentation layout video chat interface and observe no effects of social anxiety on public self-awareness, 2nd person pronoun use, or number of topics discussed; no effect of feedback on experienced anxiety; and no link between number of topics and self-disclosure. Video chat adopters and designers should consider how feedback and interface layout affect conversations.
https://doi.org/10.1145/3411764.3445664
The ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (https://chi2021.acm.org/)