Eye Contact May Make You Less Persuasive to Those Who Disagree

Want to be persuasive? Then you'd better break eye contact. While making eye contact has long been considered an effective way of drawing a listener in and bringing him around to your point of view, scientists have now found the opposite to be true. It turns out that eye contact may actually make people more resistant to persuasion, especially when they already disagree.

In order to investigate the effects of eye contact, researchers decided to take advantage of a recently developed eye-tracking technology. They had volunteers spend time look at a speaker's eyes while watching a video. Surprisingly, the scientists found that the more time they spent watching the eyes of a speaker, the less persuaded they were by the speaker's argument. In fact, spending more time looking at the speaker's eyes was only associated with greater receptiveness to the speaker's opinion among participants who already agreed with the speaker.

That's not all the scientists found, though. They also discovered that participants who were told to look at the speaker's eyes displayed less of a shift in attitudes than did those participants who were told to look at the speaker's mouth. This seemed to indicate that eye contact made a person less persuasive.

"There is a lot of cultural lore about the power of eye contact as an influence tool," said Frances Chen, the lead researcher, in a news release. "But our findings show that direct eye contact makes skeptical listeners less likely to change their minds, not more, as previously believed."

The findings highlight the fact that eye contact can actually signal different types of messages depending on the situation. While eye contact may be a sign of connection or trust in friendly situations, it's more likely associated with dominance or intimidation in adversarial situations.

"Whether you're a politician or a parent, it might be helpful to keep in mind that trying to maintain eye contact may backfire if you're trying to convince someone who has a different set of believes than you," said Julie Minson, co-author of the new study, in a news release.

Currently, the researchers are planning to look at whether eye contact may be associated with certain patterns of brain activity, the release of stress hormones and an increase in heart rate during persuasion techniques. The findings could reveal a little bit more about how eye contact can impact an individual.

The findings are published in the journal Psychological Science.