We’re terrible at virtual hangouts, but getting better could help save lives.

Learning how your brain works will let you plan for engagement and limit distraction so you can connect with others while you’re apart.

We’re bad at virtual interaction and need to improve.

Everyone is rightly talking about “social distancing” as the only effective way to flatten the curve. We call it social distancing, but what we actually mean is physical distancing. Social bonds exist across space and time, and now more than ever, we must use technology to maintain them. Virtual interaction can lead to social connection, but it often feels impoverished because digitally mediated communication is not natural for our brains. In February of 2020, that was trivial; a boring online class here, an unengaging FaceTime call there — a poorly run Zoom meeting wasn’t ideal, but it wasn’t a matter of life or death. It is now. The more disconnected we feel, the more likely we will be to ignore the guidance about social distancing.

You probably think technology is the problem. Bad wifi and poorly designed interfaces are terrible, but, more often than not, the technology is solid and it’s the people who are terrible at using it. As a researcher, I study the building blocks of social cognition. As a professor, I teach at a “distributed” university where I meet with my students and colleagues exclusively via video conferencing. I often spend more time on video calls than I do sleeping. I want you to know why we should be having virtual interactions, why your brain gets in the way of them being good, and how you can fix that. If you’re about to go on a Zoom date, feel free to skip to the tips at the end, but they’ll make more sense after a brief scientific detour. Let’s get started.

Our brains were designed for face-to-face connection, not FaceTime.

For humans, survival of the fittest meant survival of the “groupiest,” which is why social connections (or lack thereof) impact mortality more than known health hazards like smoking, drinking, and heart conditions¹. We need each other. Video conferencing has the potential to connect us, but processing people in this way is not natural for our brains; our cognitive hardware was shaped long before Skype existed². When we video conference, people are compressed into bits and bytes, sent across town or around the world, and spit out as pixels and digital tones. Our brains assemble these signals into a vivid representation of another living being. Technology and cognition work together to cast a “magic spell” on our subjective experience. It’s not exactly teleportation, but it’s close.

The key ingredient of the magic spell is attention, a complex process that gives rise to conscious experience³. Attention comes in two forms: endogenous and exogenous. Endogenous attention is effortful and selectively applied; it makes sure we can focus. Exogenous attention is reflexive, like when motion or a loud noise grabs our attention; it alerts us that something could need focus. In a video call, attention can trick us into feeling that people are physically together because our brain makes sense of the social inputs the best way it knows how⁴. Disparate physical realities become one shared, but precarious, virtual reality. If our endogenous attention focuses on what someone is saying, the spell stays intact, but if a video stream grabs our exogenous attention because someone is wandering around their house, the spell breaks. For the spell to work, you need to stay focused, the other people need to stay focused, and the shared reality needs to be engaging. Having virtual interactions feel real enough to engender social connection is a team effort.

But we are all bad at this. The first problem is that we try to pay attention to other people on the very devices that hold our most compelling distractions. Our brains evolved hundreds of thousands of years ago to keep us safe in an unstable world, but we’ve filled our lives with pop-up notifications and bouncing alerts. Digital distractions won’t kill us, but our brains don’t know that; the icon jumps, exogenous attention is grabbed, and the spell is broken. The good news is, this problem is solvable. We can plan to keep our environmental distractions at bay. The bad news is, when we succeed in focusing, we create a new problem. As endogenous attention keeps our focus on the virtual interaction, we become oblivious to things we do that break the spell for someone else. We humans generally assume that our experience is the experience of others and don’t realize that people see things differently than we do⁵. As an example: dear friend wearing a tube top: I know that *you know* you’re wearing clothes, but based on your video, my brain’s not sure.

So the problem is two-fold: we are easily distracted by weird things others do, and we are blind to the weird things we do that distract others. I’ve seen all kinds of fails. There are the many kids whose eyeglasses reflect them doing something else and can’t figure out how I know they’re not paying attention. There’s the guy who was so intent on watching a movie after class that he forgot to turn off his video, picked up his computer, and snuggled into bed. There are the roommates who change clothes in the background, the kids who burst into meetings, the dogs that start barking, the cats that jump on the keyboard, the spouse who makes funny faces in the background of the video, the dad who curiously peers into the camera over a shoulder, the mom who walks past. Without pants.

But virtual life is not always absurd. We can laugh during happy hours, comfort someone who is crying, and host birthday parties, all while sitting alone in our homes, connected to others through a computer. I’ve spent countless hours getting to know students and colleagues whom I’ve never met in person, and when we finally did meet, it felt like a family reunion. Virtual interaction, done well, can create incredibly strong bonds. It just requires knowing how attention works and structuring our environments to play nice with our brains. Here are some suggestions to help with the learning curve.

How to make virtual interaction work.

Have a broad set of contacts. Virtual interactions are important for people who live alone, but cohabitants need virtual others more than ever. People who rely solely on their partners to meet increasingly diverse needs end up dissatisfied, while those with rich social lives are happier in their romantic relationships⁶. Absences make the heart grow fonder⁷. Engineer in-person absences to maintain virtual bonds.

• To stay connected at work, set up a designated workspace (it can be as simple as using one side of the couch for watching TV and the other side for working). When you’re in your workspace, use it as a reminder that you should virtually be with your colleagues; have meetings but also coffee breaks and lunch dates.
• After work, video chat with friends you would have gone out with.
• On the weekends, virtually visit friends and family to share a meal.

Once you have virtual buddies, collaboratively set attentional norms. Explicitly discuss how easy it is to be distracted, but agree to give it your best shot. If it feels weird to bring that up randomly, send them this article and ask what they think. These norms should focus on setting up your environment to maintain the attentional spell for you and them⁸.

• Let yourself focus: Find a quiet physical space, and reduce the noise in your digital space: close other windows and tabs, turn off notifications, quit messaging apps. Close your email or try inbox pausing. Hide or shrink your menus — the icons act as little attention hijackers, especially when they bounce or have a red badge. Try full-screening your call; even the edge of a mostly covered window can be distracting. If you’re on your computer, keep your phone out of sight; if you’re on your phone, mute notifications. Think of not multitasking as brain exercise. Paying attention signals respect allowing your connection to be authentic; if you’re on a call, you might as well be there.
• Let others focus: Put your video on, make sure you are centered, well lit, and clear. Where possible use ethernet instead of wifi. Do not lie in bed, do not sit in the dark, do not be backlit, do not move around, do not talk to others off-screen, do not sit in loud places with lots of things happening in the background of your video. Do not interrupt someone when you know that they are trying to focus. Ask people to call you out on distracting elements that you missed and weed them from your behavior. Create a virtual presence in which the most noticeable things are your thoughtful nods and brilliant contributions.

In the interaction, keep it engaging. Avoid large-scale, one-way communication. We tolerate being talked at in-person because it is socially unacceptable to blatantly attend elsewhere. Behavior is more hidden on a computer; if you don’t make it interactive, people will do something else.

• Whether it’s a business meeting or virtual catch up with friends, consider assigning prep work and using activity goals and engagement cues. Prep work asks people to prepare something to share. Activity goals tell people what they’ll do during the call and why. Engagement cues tell people what to focus on to achieve the goal. These work together to keep the discussion moving⁹.
• In groups, a discussion leader should connect the dots between different people’s points. Encourage hand raising, and cold call people for feedback on others’ contributions. Use names; in a video call, no one knows the target of your eye contact. Avoid confusion by explicitly passing the baton to the next person. If the group is large, send people into virtual breakouts to talk with a smaller group, then lead a debrief to contrast group insights.
• Discuss things that people care about. You probably don’t know what those things are¹⁰, so ask. Use this opportunity to better connect as humans, regardless of the medium.

Turning virtual interaction into social connection is crucial.

If we plan for engagement and keep distractions at bay, our brains perform a fantastic magic trick, weaving digital components into real human bonds. It just takes some adjustment and some planning. If you think it seems silly or fascist to appoint a virtual discussion leader and you long for organic conversations with a few friends at your favorite pub, I hear you. But this is the best path forward for now. If we all stay physically apart but socially connected, we’ll get back to those happy hours sooner rather than later.

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Christine Looser is an Assistant Professor in the Business College at the Minerva Schools, where she teaches exclusively via video conferencing in a virtual classroom, and a Research Associate at Harvard, where she occasionally teaches in-person in the Psychology Department. She has a PhD in Cognitive Neuroscience from Dartmouth College and a BA from the College of the Holy Cross. Reach out.

End Notes.

1. Humans are incredibly social. Read about the evolution of our social skills here: Herrmann E, Call J, Hernandez-Lloreda MV, Hare B, Tomasello M. (2008). Humans have evolved specialized skills of social cognition: the cultural intelligence hypothesis. Science, 317:1360–66. Or read more about health outcomes data here: Holt-Lunstad, J., Smith, T. B., & Layton, J. B. (2010). Social relationships and mortality risk: a meta-analytic review. PLoS Medicine, 7(7), e1000316.
2. In the past 150,000 years, our environments have vastly changed, but our brains have not (read the excellent book Sapiens, by Yuval Noah Harari). We have no business being able to read, drive, or use Snapchat because those are inventions that did not exist in our evolutionary past. However, our brain solves these modern challenges with “cortical recycling,” rewiring evolutionarily old circuits to process newer, more abstract stimuli. Get nitty-gritty here: Dehaene, S. (2005). Evolution of human cortical circuits for reading and arithmetic: The “neuronal recycling” hypothesis. In, From monkey brain to human brain, (pp. 133–157). Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press. Or read this slightly more accessible paper on reading: Huettig, F., Kolinsky, R., & Lachmann, T. (2018). The culturally co-opted brain: how literacy affects the human mind. Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, 33:3, 275–277, DOI: 10.1080/23273798.2018.1425803.
3. Attention is wildly complex. You can learn more here: Carrasco, M. (2011). Visual attention: The past 25 years. Vision Research, 51(13), 1484–1525.
4. Your brain didn’t evolve to process modern replications of human form, but even things that mimic humans are, on some level, processed as social: Looser, C. E., Guntupalli, J. S., & Wheatley, T. (2013). Multivoxel patterns in face-sensitive temporal regions reveal an encoding schema based on detecting life in a face. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 8(7), 799–805.
5. Psychologists call the tendency to assume others see the world as we do “naïve realism.” Learn more here: Ross, L., & Ward, A. (1996). Naive realism in everyday life: Implications for social conflict and misunderstanding. In T. Brown, E. S. Reed & E. Turiel (Eds.), Values and Knowledge (pp. 103–135). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
6. This should be required reading for anyone in a relationship. I suggest casually leaving a printed copy hanging around for your spouse to find, or assigning it as pre-work for your next Zoom date: Finkel, E. J., Cheung, E. O., Emery, L. F., Carswell, K. L., & Larson, G. M. (2015). The suffocation model: Why marriage in America is becoming an all-or-nothing institution. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 24(3), 238–244.
7. “Absence makes the heart grow fonder” is backed up by data: Bhattacharya, K., Ghosh, A., Monsivais, D., Dunbar, R., & Kaski, K. (2017). Absence makes the heart grow fonder: social compensation when failure to interact risks weakening a relationship. EPJ Data Science, 6(1), 1–10.
8. To avoid distraction, we need to use self-control. Thankfully, people who are good at self-control aren’t weirdos who don’t want to have fun or superheroes who resist temptation exceptionally well; they are just ordinary people who structure their lives to avoid temptation: Galla, B. M., & Duckworth, A. L. (2015). More than resisting temptation: Beneficial habits mediate the relationship between self-control and positive life outcomes. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 109(3), 508).
9. Here are two ideas for prep work, activity goals, and engagement cues. Business example. Prep work: “Do a post-mortem of our last project and identify at least one place for improvement.” Activity goal: “For the next twenty minutes, we’re going to share the areas of improvement we identified in our prep work so we can better plan future projects.” Engagement cue: “We’ll share things that went right or wrong, and as you listen to others share, be prepared to explain how we could have better predicted the issue your colleague identified.” Social example. Prep work: “Identify the high and low point of your week.” Activity goal: “To start, we’re going to get a sense of how people are doing by sharing our highs and lows.” Engagement cue: “As you listen to others’ highs and lows, I want you to try and think of times you’ve had similar experiences and be ready to share a time you’ve felt the same.”
10. Humans are notoriously bad at knowing what others care about. Here are two examples: Cooney, G., Gilbert, D. T., & Wilson, T. D. (2017). The novelty penalty: Why do people like talking about new experiences but hearing about old ones? Psychological Science, 28(3), 380–394. Jordan, M. R., Gebert, T., & Looser, C. E. (2019). Perspective taking failures in the valuation of mind and body. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 148(3), 407.