Our look speaks volumes — about friendliness and openness, about love or about a threat. Too close can be confusing. On the other hand, if we do not look into the eyes of the interlocutor, this is perceived as impolite or insecure. How to find a compromise?
Eye contact is perhaps the most important thing when you first meet. How long should the look of the interlocutor last, so as not to cause us discomfort, decided to find out the British psychologist Nicola Binetti (Nicola Binetti) and his colleagues. They conducted an experiment in which almost 500 volunteers (ages 11 to 79) from 56 countries were invited to participate.1.
The participants were shown fragments of a video recording in which the actor or actress looked directly into the eyes of the viewer for a certain time (from a tenth of a second to 10 seconds). With the help of special cameras, the researchers tracked the expansion of the pupils of the subjects, after each fragment they were also asked if it seemed to them that the actor in the recording looked into their eyes for too long or, on the contrary, too little. They were also asked to rate how attractive and/or threatening the people in the videos appeared to be. In addition, the participants answered the questions of the questionnaire.
The optimal duration of eye contact is 2 to 5 seconds
It turned out that the optimal duration of eye contact ranged from 2 to 5 seconds (average — 3,3 seconds).
It was this length of eye-to-eye gaze that was most comfortable for the participants. However, none of the subjects liked being looked into their eyes for less than a second or for more than 9 seconds. At the same time, their preferences did not depend on personality traits and almost did not depend on gender and age (there was one exception — older men more often wanted to look women in the eyes longer).
The attractiveness of the actors in the video did not play a significant role. However, if an actor or actress seemed angry, they wanted to make as little eye contact as possible.
Because the study involved people from nearly 60 different countries, these results can be considered to be culturally independent and eye contact preferences are roughly the same for most people.
1 N. Binetti et al. «Pupil dilation as an index of preferred mutual gaze duration», Royal Society Open Science, July 2016.