New Study Reveals Surprising Findings About Eye Contact in Conversations
A new study from researchers in Canada has revealed surprising findings about eye contact and mutual looking during conversations. The study, published in Scientific Reports, looked at the nonverbal communication behaviors of pairs of people engaged in conversation and found that direct eye-to-eye contact was quite rare, but significant for social dynamics.
The researchers, led by first author Florence Mayrand, an experimental psychologist at McGill University in Canada, used mobile eye-tracking glasses to measure the eye-gazing patterns of 15 pairs of strangers engaged in face-to-face conversations. The participants, made up of 25 women and 5 men between the ages of 18 and 24, were asked to rank 12 items in order of usefulness in a made-up survival situation while wearing the eye-tracking glasses.
The results showed that mutual looking – when each participant looks at their partner’s face at the same time – was rare, and eye-to-eye contact was even rarer. However, the little eye-to-eye contact that did occur was found to predict the participants’ likelihood to follow their partner’s gaze as the conversation flowed on.
According to Mayrand, the time spent engaging in eye-to-eye contact, even if for just a few seconds, appeared to be an important predictive factor for subsequent social behavior.
The study also found that when pairs did look directly into each other’s eyes, one of them was more likely to follow their partner’s gaze in a follow-up test. Eye-to-mouth mutual looks were also linked to a tendency to follow their partner’s gaze in a second experiment.
The researchers noted that the amount of time people spend looking each other in the eyes may be important for communicating social messages, and different mutual looking patterns may be useful for relaying specific messages in different combinations.
However, the study also found that participants spent only about 12 percent of conversation time in interactive looking, meaning that they gazed at each other’s faces simultaneously for just 12 percent of the interaction duration. Even more surprisingly, within those interactions, participants engaged in mutual eye-to-eye contact only 3.5 percent of the time.
The study’s small sample size and the specific task the participants completed together may have influenced the results, so the researchers noted that larger studies with different conversational contexts are needed to further understand the dynamics of mutual looking during conversations.
Overall, the study provides valuable insights into the role of eye contact and mutual looking in communication, and raises important questions for future research on the social messages communicated by the eyes.