Researchers at McGill University in Canada have made a surprising discovery about eye contact during face-to-face conversations. Using mobile eye-tracking technology, the team of experimental psychologists found that mutual looking, or direct eye contact, is actually quite rare. Participants in the study spent just 12% of their conversation time engaged in mutual looking and only 3.5% of the time engaged in mutual eye-to-eye contact.
The study involved 15 pairs of strangers, with 12 females and 2 males ultimately included in the final analysis. During the conversations, participants primarily looked at each other’s mouths and eyes, with eye-to-mouth mutual looking being the most common. This challenges past research that has emphasized the importance of eye contact in communication.
Interestingly, the researchers also found that the amount of eye-to-eye contact during conversation predicted participants’ likelihood to follow their partner’s gaze. This suggests that the amount of time people spend looking each other in the eyes may play a role in communicating social messages.
The authors of the study acknowledge that the context of the task participants completed together may have influenced the results. They stress the need for future research to explore how conversational context and familiarity between participants affect their eye-gazing patterns.
The study’s findings were published in the journal Scientific Reports, shedding light on an often-overlooked aspect of human interaction. These new findings challenge previous assumptions and open up new avenues for further research. Understanding the role of eye contact in communication could have significant implications for fields such as psychology, sociology, and even business.
So next time you find yourself in a face-to-face conversation, take note of how often you make eye contact with the other person. It may be more rare than you think.
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