I remember reading a while back about an experiment whereby one person would stop in the street and start gazing at the sky.  People would generally ignore him and carry on with their business.  If another person joined them it still wouldn't trigger much of a response.  There comes a tipping point however where passers by are sucked into this behaviour and feel compelled to join in the star gazing, even if there's nothing obvious to capture their gaze.

New research has revealed that the status of the initial person has a big impact on whether people follow.  An Italian team examined whether our attention is grabbed by the gaze of politicians whose leanings match our own.

The team monitored the gaze of 28 participants from both right and left of the political spectrum.  Each participant was asked to look left if a square on the screen turned blue, or right if it turned orange.  A twist was that the square was located in the middle of the eyes of a politician.  Just before the square changed colour, the politicians eyes shifted direction to either match required by the subsequent colour change or oppose it.  The experiment used politicians from both ends of the political spectrum, including Berlusconi and Romano Prodi.

Whilst the gaze of the politician didn't influence the reaction speed of each participant, it did affect their accuracy.  Right leaning participants were strongly influenced by the gaze of  the right wing participants used in the experiment, but not by the left wing politicians.  Interestingly though, left leaning participants were not influenced, regardless of the leanings of the politicians.

The researchers concluded that their study shows how: "… a sophisticated blend of situational and dispositional factors underlies the capture of reflexive gaze-following exerted on voters by the gaze of politicians. Future studies on the plasticity of this effect may provide new insights in the fundamental aspect of the human tendency to coalesce in large groups and complex societies."