The Cognitive and Interpersonal Costs of Video
As advances in communication technology proliferate, organizations are rapidly incorporating new communication media into their environment. Unfortunately, not much is known about the effect of communication technologies on the processing of interpersonal information. Interactive communication media that place more cognitive demands on interactants may impoverish the process of impression formation. Today's video, because of the additional information conveyed and problems with signal quality, may reduce systematic processing of information and interfere with the impression-formation process. Three studies explore the relationship between communication media, cognitive load, and impression formation. Study 1 establishes that interacting over an audio-video system requires more cognitive load than does interacting over audio only. Study 2 replicates work by Ford and Kruglanski (1995) that finds that people's impressions are more biased toward a primed trait under high cognitive load. Study 3 assesses the i...