Gaze Shifting Affects What People Think Of You

Situation Number One:

You walk into a bar. A good-looking stranger looks up from their phone and makes direct eye contact.

Situation Number Two:

You walk into the same bar. A good-looking stranger is already looking at you, but as you make eye contact, he or she looks away.

What’s the difference between shifting the gaze towards, or shifting the gaze away?

Everything according to researchers from Dartmouth.

They put a group of students through two experiments.

Experiment number one:

The students were asked to rate the likability of images of women appearing on the screen.

However these images had moving eyes. They would either start by looking right at the students and then look away, or start by looking away and then looking at them.

What did they find?

The people whose eyes shifted from away to towards the students were rated on average as more likeable.

This isn’t exactly surprising. Our brains are wired for social connection, and to receive the attention of another person, even through something as simple as the direction of their gaze, means a lot to us.

But it gets more interesting in the second experiment.

Experiment number two:

Everything happened the same as experiment number one, only this time the students were asked to rate attractiveness.

The results?

The men all rated the images with eyes moving towards them as more attractive than those moving away.

The women?

No difference. Same level of attractiveness regardless of gaze direction.

What does this mean?

For one, its a hint that if you want someone to like you, or find you attractive, its a good idea to look at them.

For two, how eye contact behaviour effects our perceptions of others changes given who we are and who the other person is. How attractive the images appeared to the women didn’t change at all with the different gaze shifts, yet for the men, it made all the difference.

In other words, same eye contact behaviour, different effect on the observer.

Armed with this knowledge, we can alter our eye contact behaviour to fit the person we are speaking to and the situation we are in.

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Source:

Mason, M. F., Tatkow, E. P., & Macrae, C. N. (2005). The Look of Love: Gaze Shifts and Person Perception. Psychological Science, 16(3), 236–239.