What the science says

When your sound is poor, people like you less and think less of what you say, even when they understand every word. Several studies have now measured it, along with what your camera and background do.

Sound quality changes how people judge you

In 2018, Eryn Newman of the Australian National University and Norbert Schwarz of the University of Southern California played people the same short talks, some with good sound and some with poorer audio.¹ In the first experiment, 97 people watched clips from two conference talks, one on engineering and one on physics. In the second, 99 people listened to two interviews from the NPR show Science Friday. With poor sound, people found the speakers less likeable and less intelligent, rated the talks as worse, and rated the research as less important.²

“As soon as we reduced the audio quality, all of a sudden, the scientists and their research lost credibility,” Newman said.²

A much larger study in 2025 went further. It ran six experiments with about 4,800 listeners, who heard the same short passages, such as job application essays, either clear or processed to sound “tinny”, like a cheap laptop microphone on a video call. Listeners understood every word equally well either way. Even so, speakers with tinny audio were judged less intelligent, less hireable, less credible and less romantically desirable. The researchers say videoconferencing is what prompted the study.³

It affects hiring

In a 2018 study of video job interviews, two groups of about 100 people rated candidates in recordings that were either clean or had glitches: frozen frames, visual filters and audio static. Candidates with good audio and video were rated more hireable, even when the raters were told to ignore the quality.⁴

Looking at the camera, not the screen

A small 2024 study had students give the same short speech twice, once looking into the camera and once looking at the screen. Working adults then rated the recordings. Looking away from the camera was rated worse than looking into it, and even worse than audio with no video at all.⁵ It’s one small study, but it matches what the check shows: when your camera isn’t where your eyes are, people see you looking away.

Camera angle and background change first impressions

A 2015 study moved the webcam either below or above the screen during video chats. People filmed from below were seen as taller, and their partners went along with their choices more often in a simple game.⁶ A later study found mixed results,⁷ so the safe conclusion is that camera angle changes how people read you, not that one angle always wins. We still suggest eye level, because it looks like you’re across the table from someone.

A 2023 study showed 167 people faces on different video call backgrounds. Backgrounds changed how trustworthy and competent the same face seemed. A bookcase or plants scored best, and ordinary home backgrounds and novelty backgrounds scored worst.⁸

Why it happens

Norbert Schwarz explains it with an idea psychologists call processing fluency: information that’s easy to take in feels more familiar and more believable. “When you make it difficult for people to process information, it becomes less credible,” he said.²

What it means for your calls

These studies used recordings and simulated calls, not your calls. But they point the same way: a muffled microphone, a glitchy picture, or eyes on the wrong screen make you harder to take in, and people judge you by it without realising. Most of those problems cost nothing to fix.

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