When we chat, a lot gets said without words—our bodies, hands, and eyes spill the beans. The way we look at each other spills even more, telling tales of what’s on our minds. But here’s the catch: we’re not quite sure what exactly our eyes are saying. Is just staring at someone’s face enough, or do we need to lock eyes for the real deal?
A team from McGill University and Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM) decided to crack the code. They watched how people looked at each other during face-to-face chats. Surprise, surprise: direct eye contact wasn’t all that common, but when it did happen, it was like a secret language shaping the way we act around others.
Secret language
The study saw strangers paired up and faced with a make-believe survival situation. Wearing special glasses that tracked their eye movements, they had to rank a bunch of items by how useful they’d be for survival. The researchers paid close attention to how often the participants glanced at each other’s eyes and mouths.
But there’s more. They also tested each person separately to see how well they could follow someone else’s gaze. The results showed that the way people looked at each other—whether it was eye-to-eye or eye-to-mouth—was linked to how much they followed their partner’s gaze.
In a nutshell, this study dives into the silent language of our eyes during conversations. It turns out, even though direct eye contact might not happen all the time, when it does, it speaks volumes about how we connect with others.
“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,” the researchers explain. “Even more surprisingly, within those interactions, participants engaged in mutual eye-to-eye contact only 3.5% of the time.”
The heat of the conversation
In the heat of the conversation, the participants often glanced away more than locking eyes with their partners. When their focus did land on each other’s faces, it wasn’t a starring contest—they split their attention fairly between the eyes and the mouth. Surprisingly, direct eye-to-eye contact didn’t take up much of their time.
But here’s the twist: the moments they did spend gazing into each other’s eyes turned out to be crystal balls for what came next. Those pairs who locked eyes were the ones more likely to follow where their partner was looking afterward. It’s like a sneak peek into the dance of our gazes, revealing that when we meet eyes, it sets the stage for a follow-the-gaze routine.
“This study is one of the first to show the prevalence of eye-to-eye looking during real-life interactions. 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,” the researchers conclude.
This study opens up some interesting paths for future research. One is figuring out what those eye glances are really telling us in social situations. Another is looking into how eye contact changes in different situations, and whether the way we talk affects how we look at each other. It’s like there’s a bunch of interesting stuff waiting to be discovered in the future.
