Not Feeling Seen: Eye Contact and Psychological Safety

There really is some bad advice and research around in respect to psychological safety, in particular how it relates to aspects of neurodiversity and culture.  In this piece, we’re going to dive into this, with a focus on a particular research paper which illustrates some of the issues we see too often.

The paper and its main claim

The paper we’re looking at is this 2022 working paper on eye contact from Harvard Business School. The authors recruited a sample of 75 groups of three people, and studied the conversations they had. 

Through these observations, they ‘found’ that eye-gaze increases psychological safety and helps people to feel included. Which, in this context, may have been true. But the authors went on to conclude that “eye gaze is an important behavioral strategy for leaders to establish psychological safety”. And this is where the real problems begin.

Sampling and generalisation issues

First of all, it’s important to note that this is a Harvard Business School working paper, not a peer-reviewed journal article. The authors studied 75 triads, mostly young HBS students. Of course, when you’re researching within a university context, studying students is often the most convenient approach, but it does raise significant concerns if you wish to generalise your results to contexts outside of Western universities. 

The research was also conducted in highly controlled lab or simulated settings (including a Zoom study with a confederate, and even an avatar-based simulation). While such methods help isolate specific variables, they’re far removed from the messy, high-stakes, culturally nuanced contexts where psychological safety really matters. What works in a lab bubble may not hold in high-stakes, emotionally loaded or culturally nuanced real‑world settings. Many parents may be familiar with the idea that it’s often easier to have candid conversations with your child in the car, precisely because there is no sustained eye contact.

The authors also included participants they described as “racial minorities,” ostensibly to test whether the effect was restricted to white, Western participants. But the term itself is deeply problematic. It centres whiteness as the default, despite white people being a global minority, and it erases important inter-group differences by collapsing diverse communities into a single homogenous category. Perhaps most importantly, the very language of “minorities” invokes a power hierarchy – and power gradients are one of the most effective ways to erode psychological safety.

Even putting the terminology aside, the study made no effort to consider whether these participants had learned eye contact behaviours through their experience in a Western university context. Nor was there recognition of how cultural heritage and beliefs might shape the meaning of gaze – or whether what looked like “increased eye contact” was in fact an act of masking, with participants conforming to Western, neurotypical norms rather than their natural and authentic expression.

Why eye contact isn’t universally safe

Yes, for some people, sustained eye contact may help to build rapport, trust and psychological safety, but that’s unlikely to be the case for all members of the team. 

Many cultures consider sustained eye contact (i.e. more than just a glance), disrespectful, especially when interacting with someone of a higher status or an elder in the community. Insisting on it is likely to do more harm than good to psychological safety, forcing people to behave in ways which feel unnatural and inappropriate. 

“Look at me while I’m talking to you.”

In other contexts, sustained eye contact or gaze may be interpreted as surveillance, dominance, or even hostility.

Many neurodiverse folks (and plenty who don’t identify as neurodivergent), find persistent eye contact to be challenging, or impossible. For them, trying to comply with advice to sustain eye contact can be cognitively exhausting and contributes to masking, leaving them less safe, not more. We mustn’t ask neurodivergent people to ignore their bodily instincts simply in order to make other people more comfortable. Instead of sustained eye contact, psychological safety for many people may look like fiddling with something, doodling, walking around or looking up at the ceiling or down at the floor. 

Ultimately, forcing someone to sustain eye contact when they struggle to or find it inappropriate to do so is a violation of their bodily autonomy.

The role of personality

The authors do recognise that personality traits may shape responses to gaze, and in Study 2 they explore “introversion versus extraversion” (I have concerns around these denominations in practice). They report that introverted participants tended to benefit more from receiving gaze, speaking more and feeling safer when looked at compared to extraverts. This nuance is important, but even within their own findings, the effects are not uniform: gaze while silent seemed to encourage speaking, whereas gaze while speaking related to perceptions of voice. These complexities are easily glossed over in the paper’s headline claim that eye gaze is universally positive.

It also doesn’t consider for example that for some introverts, gaze might be welcome in a controlled lab setting but overwhelming or draining in real-world contexts, especially where there are power dynamics or gradients at play. Nor does it explore the role of intersectionality – how introverts who are also neurodivergent or from non-western cultures may experience gaze differently. In other words, while the findings acknowledge personality differences, they don’t fully capture the range of individual variation or the possible downsides of gaze.

The broader problem

Some of the mediation effects reported in the paper were marginal, hovering around significance, yet the authors frame their conclusions as strong and widely generalisable. And while the authors do include a limitations section, their focus is almost entirely statistical. What’s missing is any reflection on the design choices themselves: the reliance on student samples, artificial lab and simulation settings, and the lack of consideration for cultural variation, neurodiversity, or intersectionality. These omissions matter, because while statistics can show patterns in the data, research design determines whether those patterns can be meaningfully applied to real teams in the real world.

Taken together, these risk reinforcing a normative, Western, neurotypical model of psychological safety – one that can make those already least represented feel less safe, not more. 

A more appropriate and balanced conclusion from the paper might have been: 

“Eye gaze appears to be one behavioural strategy that, under certain conditions, can support psychological safety, provided that all participants share Western cultural norms regarding eye contact and do not experience cognitive or emotional discomfort with sustained eye gaze due to neurodivergence or any other factors.”

Great leaders and team members recognise individual differences and adapt their approach, whilst also communicating their own needs, preferences and boundaries. Psychological safety requires that people feel understood and recognised as individuals, which means one-size-fits-all prescriptions are at best ineffective and at worst, harmful. The more we buy into, and fail to critically reflect on, eye-catching headlines and simple answers to complex problems, the further we drift from the core of what our work should be about. 

https://www.hbs.edu/ris/Publication%20Files/22-048_555465b5-4649-44dd-ad1b-b178e301b4ad.pdf
Further Reading:

• Psychological safety doesn’t look the same to everyone
• (Don’t) Look me in the Eye: The Challenge of Eye Contact
• Speaking Up: Neurodiversity & Dyspraxia
• Comfort vs Need
• You Have a Body
• Stuttering and Stammering
• How to Foster Psychological Safety: Behaviours
• Personal User Manuals

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