Don’t Focus on the Most Expressive Face in the Audience

 

When making a presentation, a speech or when pitching your idea to a group of people, you tend to scan the faces in front of you to gauge audience reactions. You look at facial expressions to understand how well your presentation is being received by your audience, in a fraction of second. Making these split-second decisions is a critical skill. This becomes even more complicated as you read the social cues in a group of people.

Research shows that we pay more attention to faces expressing strong emotions and pay less attention to those less intense emotions. Our bias can mislead the speaker's impression of how well this is being received. 

we tend to conclude that an audience's reaction is more intense than it is.

The larger the group, the more they overestimate of the audience emotional state. However they were randomly distributed among faces, larger groups had a greater likelihood of containing highly emotional faces than smaller groups. But, we tend to get drawn by highly emotional faces and therefore tend to overestimate the emotional level of the audience.

Next, the speaker/presenter overestimates the negative expressions of the audience than the positive expressions. Research also suggests that we tend to get drawn more to faces expressing negative emotions than to faces expressing positive emotions. So the presenter's ability to judge an audience is skewed by intense emotions especially towards those with negative expressions.

This indicates a way out though it has to be further authenticated by research studies. To overcome this bias of focusing on emotional faces which leads to overestimating the group's emotionality, scan deliberately across the audience, across both emotional and non-emotional faces which may correct the bias towards one emotion. 

Also, there is a tendency to amplify the strong emotional responses in a virtual setting where one is likely to miss out on the weaker emotional signal that becomes more noticeable in an in-person meeting.

So when you start a presentation scan the entire audience, instead of one or two highly emotional responses. This would offset the bias to some extent and you would be in a better position to make a more accurate judgement of how the audience feels.

Don’t Focus on the Most Expressive Face in the Audience
by Amit Goldenberg and Erika Weisz HBR 2020/12