Can you fight Zoom fatigue? Want to know your Zoom Exhaustion and Fatigue score? Scientists to the rescue!

So I’ve been cooking this post for quite some time by now.  You know I firmly believe eventprofs should apply scientific insights more intentionally. For that, we need to start educating ourselves on behavioral science and psychology. One great way to do that is of course, through reading books. Below is my top 6 list of behavioral science books for event planners I highly recommend. They all are authored by renowned researchers and – this is the best part – are written for professionals from other industries and generally all interested, so they are engaging and very much fun to read.

This year Nudgestock festival of behavioral science took place online, and became a unique opportunity for anyone interested to hear leading experts from behavioral science and psychology fields. Naturally, I could not miss that, and it didn’t disappoint: both from content and event planning perspective it was fascinating to experience. I did 3 posts highlighting most interesting sessions in my view, and detailing my takeaways for #eventprofs community. As they were published within a couple of weeks, I thought I’d put it together as a summary so that you don’t have to search them one by one. So here we go.

As pricing and increasing sales for online events is currently a hot topic, I thought it’s a good time to remind about anchoring effect.

In 1974 Kahneman and Tversky did an experiment in which they first asked participants to spin a wheel containing the numbers 1 through 100 (but participants were not told that the wheel was rigged to land on either 10 or 65).  Then the scientists asked them whether the percentage of African countries that belong to the U.N. was higher or lower than the number on the wheel, and last, they asked what each participant’s own estimate of the percentage would be.

The results indicated what is now known as anchoring effect.

For the last 2 or 3 weeks there have been a lot of articles, tips and advice on how to pivot to digital and create fantastic online event experience shared among event community. Right now, event planners are on the steep learning curve about making online events as efficient and satisfactory as possible, and oftentimes it’s not that easy as one may think. But this post is not about tips for eventprofs. Since part of my consulting is about helping event participants to attend meaningfully, I was thinking about how they feel about their event experience in these changed circumstances. It turns that it is equally uneasy for participants of our (emerging) online events to switch to this new mode and make the most out of online participation. I can clearly see it can be confusing and frustrating, partly because right now the online experiences are not ideal, and also because event participants themselves are not necessarily well familiar with technologies and virtual environment ‘rules’. So what do they need to know and do in order to adopt the new ways events are being made and adapt to it with max benefits? Here are some thoughts for online event attendees.