The strange truth about eye contact…

Wednesday, Jan 3, 2024.

In TV shows and films, actors are shown drilling into each other’s eyes as they deliver their lines — is this typical human behavior?

• Humans who are strangers rarely look each other in the eye while having a conversation, a surprising study of body language finds.

• In fact, mutual eye gaze accounts for a surprisingly paltry 3.5% of the time when two humans are conversing.

• The rest of the time humans are sometimes either looking at each other’s mouths, but mostly they’re just looking away.

• When humans actually do look at one other, however briefly, this look conveys vital and significant social messages.

• For example, turn-taking is usually signalled first by mutual eye gaze: the person who has finished speaking looks back at their conversational partner, as if to say: ‘Now it’s your turn’.

• These glances at each other’s eyes regulate this dynamic of coordinated mutual attention: when humans are both looking at the same thing, they know what they’re both talking about it.

Gaze can also signal social status: we look more at people who have high social status, partly because we are paying more attention to them, as befits their status.

How the study was conducted

The research included 7 pairs of opposite-sex strangers who chatted while they worked on an assignment together.

Brilliant up and coming researcher Ms. Florence Mayrand, from McGill is the study’s first author. She explained her findings:

“We discovered that participants spent only about 12% of conversation time in interactive looking, meaning that they gazed at each other’s faces simultaneously for just 12% of the interaction duration.

Even more surprisingly, within those interactions, participants engaged in mutual eye-to-eye contact only 3.5% of the time.”

Mostly, we look away…

• People mostly looked away from each other, and when they did look at the other person’s face, split this time between the mouth and eye regions.

• Another study has shown that people generally cannot distinguish whether you are looking at their eyes or their mouths — it all counts as ‘eye contact’ (Rogers et al., 2019).

• When people did look each other in the eye they were more likely then to look in the same direction afterwards.

• This suggests the importance of eye gaze for mutual attention.

Ms Mayrand explained:

“This study is one of the first to show the prevalence of eye-to-eye looking during real-life interactions.

We found that, surprisingly, direct eye-to-eye contact was quite rare during interactions, but that it is significant for social dynamics.

The time we engage in eye-to-eye contact, even if for a few seconds, appears to be an important predictive factor for subsequent social behavior.”

Are you lookin’ at Me?

Actors are shown drilling intently into each other’s eyes as they deliver their lines. The fact that we accept this false depiction of human interaction without question suggests we ourselves somehow privilege and aspire to powerful and effective eye contact.

It’s common folk wisdom that the avoidance of direct eye contact is somehow a harbinger of mistrust. It also suggests naratives such as low in confidence, socially anxious or an awkward communicator.

In reality, humans do not tend to look each other in the eye all that much.

Not only that, but the behavior of gazing directly into another person’s eyes may come across as weird in many situations (unless they are proposing marriage or starting a fight, then it’s perfectly normal).

The research may be some relief to those neurodiverse humans who are uncomfortable looking directly into the eyes of other humans…or to gazed at by someone else.

Isn’t it interesting how what we think we value is not how we actually behave. Rogers research suggests that quality and assurance of eye contact is very much in the eye of the beholder.

Be well, stay kind, and Godspeed.

RESEARCH:

Mayrand, F., Capozzi, F. & Ristic, J. A dual mobile eye tracking study on natural eye contact during live interactions. Sci Rep 13, 11385 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-023-38346-9

Rogers, S. L., Guidetti, O., Speelman, C. P., Longmuir, M., & Phillips, R. (2019). Contact Is in the Eye of the Beholder: The Eye Contact Illusion. Perception, 48(3), 248-252. https://doi.org/10.1177/0301006619827486