On a call, your face is most of what people get, and the lens decides how they get it.
Put the lens at eye height
What counts is the angle against the line from your face to the lens. A laptop on a desk looks up at you, which is the same as raising your chin; a phone held high looks down at you, the same as lowering it. Put the lens at eye height.
- Seen from below (a raised chin), a face without a smile reads as superior (Mignault & Chaudhuri 2003).
- Seen from above (a lowered chin), it reads as dominant, and trust drops (Witkower & Tracy 2019; Torrance et al. 2020).
- Level, it reads as neither: level faces were rated best or equal as leaders (Torrance et al. 2020).
Eye contact is with the lens
When you look at their face on your screen, they see you looking away. Look into the lens when you speak. With a face on a screen, viewers found about 3 seconds of eye contact at a time the most comfortable (Binetti et al. 2016), and on a screen a direct gaze read as pleasant in both Japan and Finland (Uono & Hietanen 2015).
Mind your listening face
Most of a call you are listening, and your face is at rest. Hanging lids and drooping mouth corners read as tired (Sundelin et al. 2013); low brows read as angry (Vernon et al. 2014). See resting face and how to look less tired.
Practise with the same camera
How I Land uses the camera you will be on, at the angle the other person sees you from. Choose “competent” or “approachable” after “Be seen as” and match the outline; what you practise is what they get.
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