Having books in your Zoom background makes you seem more trustworthy
People come across as being more trustworthy and competent on Zoom calls if they have plants or books in the background
By Christa Lesté-Lasserre
27 September 2023
When people were asked to judge the trustworthiness and competence of video callers with various backgrounds, appearing in front of plants or books came out top
Cook et al., 2023, PLOS ONE, CC-BY 4.0
People give a better first impression on Zoom calls if they have books or plants behind them, rather than a living room or a novelty background – such as a walrus in front of an iceberg.
“With videoconferencing, most of what everyone else sees – the majority of your screen – is taken up with your background,” says Paddy Ross at Durham University in the UK. “So you no longer have to just worry about how you look and how you’re presenting yourself to other people, but also what you have all around you.”
Ross and his colleagues collected 72 photos of 36 white adults, made up of 18 men and 18 women who were either smiling or had a neutral expression, taken from a human faces photo database for researchers.
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They superimposed these faces onto six different backgrounds: a living room, a blurred living room, a bookcase, plants lined up across a cupboard, a blank wall and a walrus in front of an iceberg. They then framed these images to look like screenshots during a Zoom call.
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Next, the researchers asked 167 people to rank how trustworthy and competent they thought the people in the 72 images were, on a scale of 1 to 7.
