Contagion in meetings

Emotional contagion designates the tendency to align automatically with the state expressed by others: imitating their posture, their speech rhythm, their expression, and then feeling something close to it. It is observed very early in infants and does not disappear in adults.

The best documented mechanism is motor before it is affective. One adopts an interlocutor's rhythm before sharing their mood, and the order does seem to be that one, which explains why the phenomenon escapes vigilance.

Experiments conducted on small working groups report that the affective state expressed by one participant, including a confederate instructed in advance, spreads to the others and alters their evaluations of the task, their cooperation and their reported satisfaction.

The most interesting result is that participants then attribute their state to the content of the meeting, never to the person who transmitted it. The real cause remains invisible to those who undergo it.

Diffusion is not symmetrical. The state expressed by a person in a position of authority weighs more, because the others observe them more attentively and grant them informational value about the situation.

This produces a mechanical effect rarely anticipated: an annoyance unrelated to the meeting, brought in by whoever is chairing it, will be interpreted by the participants as a judgement on what has just been said. The misunderstanding is structural, it presupposes no bad intention.

Remote exchanges alter the signals available: the body largely disappears, audio lag disrupts the synchronisation of rhythm, and the gaze is never directed where it appears to be. Contagion does not disappear, but it passes through fewer channels.

The literature on this point is recent and its results still unstable. Prudence consists in not transposing without examination what has been established in person, and in not concluding too quickly that distance protects.

One observation is enough to change how a difficult meeting is read: asking whether the ambient state was already there before you came in. The answer is often yes, and it shifts the object of analysis.

For those who pick up a great deal, the point is more important still. A tension perceived in a room is not necessarily directed at you, nor even produced by what is happening there. It may have been brought in by someone, from elsewhere, and it will leave with them.