Eye-to-eye contact is rare but shapes our social behaviour

When speaking to one another, much of the communication (about 70%) occurs nonverbally – through body posture, hand gestures, and the eyes. Our eye gaze during conversations therefore reveals a wealth of information about our attention, intention, or psychological states. But there remains little scientific knowledge about the information that human eyes convey in interactions – is looking at others’ faces enough, or does our communication require eye-to-eye contact?

A team of researchers has studied the prevalence of eye contact by recording the eye gazing behavior in face-to-face interactions and found that although eye-to-eye contact occurred rarely, it communicated important messages which are vital for subsequent successful social behavior.

The study participants, who did not know each other beforehand, were paired and presented with an imaginary survival scenario which required the pairs to rank a list of items in order of their usefulness for survival, all while wearing mobile eye-tracking glasses. The researchers analyzed how often the participants looked at each other’s eye and mouth regions. The researchers also tested each participant individually for gaze following and linked the prevalence of different types of mutual looks during the interaction (i.e., eye-to-eye vs. eye-to-mouth) with the tendency to follow their partner’s gaze.

What the researchers say: “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,” explained the lead author. “Even more surprisingly, within those interactions, participants engaged in mutual eye-to-eye contact only 3.5% of the time.”

During the interactions, the participants spent more time looking away than looking at their partner’s faces. When they did look at each other’s faces, they looked equally often at the mouth and eye region and spent little time in mutual eye-to-eye contact. However, the time spent looking directly into each other’s eyes predicted subsequent gaze-following. In other words, pairs who looked directly into each other’s eyes were more likely to follow their partner’s gaze afterwards.

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

So, what? This is an interesting study. The finding that so little time was spent in eye-to-eye contact during a conversation or task is surprising and contrary to many or our favorite assumptions. I shall be interested to see further research in this area.