Close to 1 billion meetings take place each day around the world. CEOs spend nearly three-quarters of their workdays in meetings. Planning for and spearheading meetings eats up the lion’s share of managers’ time. In much of the industrialized world, meetings are both the metronomes and menaces of people’s working lives.

Given the enormous time spent in workplace meetings, do we know what they accomplish or how to make them as worthwhile as possible? For decades, the answer was… not really. Meetings weren’t a particularly accessible subject of study. But that has changed. Once a tiny niche area, “meeting science” is a growing specialization among organizational and social psychologists. The field is accelerating as archived virtual meetings provide vast swaths of data. And it is providing a fascinating window into human behavior.

Meeting to talk helps fulfill basic human needs to connect, communicate, and cooperate. People have long come together—in caves, fields, market squares, and town halls—to get something done, share ideas, get on the same page, or just to remark on the weather. But meeting scientists define their subject as gatherings of people “with some goal or structure to the event,” says organizational psychologist Liana Kreamer of the Florida Institute of Technology, who co-authored a review of over three decades of meeting science in the 2026 Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior.

As a graduate student, Kreamer was interested in studying teamwork, leadership, and work relationships. During her doctorate work with meeting scientist Steven Rogelberg, she realized that meetings would be a fine venue for studying all of that and more. “You can use a meeting as a stage to study anything you want,” she says. After all, at their core “meetings are a fundamental aspect of how we organize and interact as social beings,” Kreamer and co-authors Rogelberg and Jon Gray, both of the University of North Carolina in Charlotte, wrote in the 2026 article.