"Stand up straight and look people in the eye"—so go the most basic commandments of engaging confidently with your fellow humans. But a new study finds that eye contact is not a blanket solution to persuading your conversation partners. Depending on how someone's opinions square up to yours, eye contact can have the opposite effect.
Prior research and anecdotal evidence suggest that people who make eye contact are more "persuasive, likable, and competent," write the study's authors. But regardless of how persuasive a person may seem because they look others in the eye, if their message is somehow controversial or disagreeable, their eye contact may ruin their chance of convincing someone.
For one study, the authors had participants fill out surveys of their political views and then watch a handful of videos of speakers discussing "hot-button" political issues, some of them looking into the camera and some looking away. The participants were allowed to look wherever they wanted, and the researchers used eye tracking software to see how often the participants gazed into the eyes of the speakers. They then measured how convinced they were by the speaker's points.
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