If I look into your eyes do I lie?

Eye contact is a cognitive attention signal, creating a visual and communicative link between two people, and involving the relational and emotional level between the two.

Looking into someone’s eyes, in addition to communicating our attention, can elicit varied, sometimes very intense emotions in them.

Looking into someone’s eyes intensely can be used to seduce during courtship, but can also trigger reactions of embarrassment, competitiveness or hostility¹. Looking away almost immediately lowers stress levels triggered during a communicative interaction, so that, on average, eye contact rarely lasts more than three seconds between interlocutors.

Eye contact is influenced by the rules of performance introjected in one’s culture. Michael Watson², in research related to proxemics in subjects of different nationalities, found that subjects from Arab cultures converse at length and in a frontal position towards the interlocutor, more so than North Americans and Europeans. In interaction, they face each other more directly. They make more eye contact, touch each other more and speak at a higher sound level. During a communicative interaction, listeners in Japan are expected to focus on the speaker’s neck so as to avoid eye contact, while in the US the opposite is the case, as it is a sign of good manners and respect to look the other person in the eye while speaking^3.In crowded lifts, it is customary not to look at the other person at all to avoid awkward small talk.

In the life of a couple, when people have loved each other for a long time or are at odds, they spend much less time looking into each other’s eyes⁴.

Direct gaze, accompanied by a smiling face and body-forward posture, is a reliable sign of good feeling between people who are getting to know each other⁵.

In primates, and later in humans, the persistent gaze evolved as a sign of dominance and or threat⁶, while avoiding the other’s gaze is often correlated with attitudes of submission to the dominant^7.

It is a cliché with no objective foundation to state that the liar ‘usually’ avoids the gaze of the interviewer. In fact, sometimes exactly the opposite is the case: in order to appear more trustworthy, interrogators often deliberately seek out the eye contact of the interviewer.

How should the professional approach the person’s different behavioural styles?

What a practitioner needs to be able to do is to draw an accurate baseline of the interviewer (series of repeated observations and interactions over time, with the aim of tracing the person’s usual behavioural style), so that he or she can immediately detect when something particular emerges.

A mistake to be avoided by interviewers is the use of an interview style with pressing and suggestive questions, with eyes fixed on the suspect, almost in an attitude of personal, inquisitorial defiance. This modus operandi only creates discomfort in the interlocutor, but it is not certain that the anxiety we may find in him may be due to the fear of being discovered (if guilty), or accompany a sincere and desperate attempt to assert one’s real innocence (experimental research has shown that using this particular type of interaction with the suspect, creates in him an increase in adaptive gestures of self-manipulation)⁸.

So how do we use our gaze to improve our communication and become effective communicators?

We realise how important it is to draw a careful baseline of our interlocutor before choosing what to say or how to interact with the other person.

This stage allows us to avoid uncomfortable misunderstandings in communication, foster the process of empathy and improve our ability to establish positive relationships with others. The gaze, like any non-verbal signal we convey, should be modulated with kindness and respect, regardless of our role or the type of communication in which we are engaged.

Diego Ingrassia

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1 Exline, R., Gray, D., & Schuette, D. (1965). Visual behavior in a dyad as affected by interview content and sex of respondent. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1(3), 201.

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2 Watson, O. M. (1970). Proxemic behavior: A cross-cultural study. The Hague: Mouton.

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3 Burgoon, J. K., & Burgoon, M. (2001). Expectancy theories. Handbook of language and social psychology, 2, 79-101.

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4 Argyle, M., & Dean, J. (1965). Eye-contact, distance and affiliation. Sociometry, 289-304.

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5 Palmer, M. T., & Simmons, K. B. (1995). Communicating intentions through nonverbal behaviors conscious and nonconscious encoding of liking. Human Communication Research, 22(1), 128-160.

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6 Blurton Jones, N. G. (1967). An ethological study of some aspects of social behaviour of children in nursery school. Primate ethology, 347-368.

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7 Altman, I. (1973). An ecological approach to the functioning of socially isolated groups. Man in Isolation and Confinement, Chicago: Airline, 241-270.

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8 Bond, M. H., & Komai, H. (1976). Targets of gazing and eye contact during interviews: Effect on Japanese nonverbal behavior. Journal of personality and social psychology, 34(6), 1276.

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