The Case for Less Eye Contact

We’ve made the case before that the mainstream advice about eye contact and psychological safety is highly western-centric and neurotypical, and lacks context and nuance. Not only does it get causation backwards, but in reality, advising people to make more eye contact in order to foster greater psychological safety is potentially harmful and exclusionary. 

So here, I thought it’d be interesting to explore a completely different angle on eye contact. What if we could foster greater psychological safety by intentionally reducing eye contact?

Three shapes of conversation

Most conversations at work take one of three physical shapes, each a different geometry of interaction. We can (1) face each other; we can (2) sit or walk side by side, oriented in the same direction; or (3) we can triangulate, all facing a third thing (a whiteboard, a screen, the thing we’re working on). Most psychological safety advice assumes the first is the ideal and the other two are somewhat lesser, degraded forms: that a “real” conversation only happens facing each other, maintaining eye contact, with full and intense focus on the person we are in conversation with. A lot of evidence suggests the truth could be the opposite, especially for difficult or intimate conversations.

Eye contact theory

First some theoretical background, because surely all the research is in favour of lots of eye contact? Not exactly. In 1965 Argyle & Dean proposed in Sociometry that intimacy is jointly regulated across gaze, physical proximity, and topic intimacy: i.e. we only have a limited capacity bucket that needs to hold all these things. So by reducing gaze, we can provide more space for topic intimacy. When we intentionally reduce eye contact, it means we can have more intimate, potentially more challenging, conversations. It’s a 60-year-old theory that mainstream eye-contact evangelism has essentially forgotten.

We can also explore this through the lens of cognitive load. Kajimura and Nomura (2016) found evidence that eye contact shares domain-general cognitive resources with speech production. Specifically, maintaining direct gaze slowed people down when words were harder to find. Reducing eye contact appears to free up cognitive resources to think about how we want to articulate something important. Glenberg, Schroeder and Robertson (1998) showed that gaze aversion facilitates remembering, and Doherty-Sneddon’s research programme showed that both adults and children avert gaze especially when questions are difficult, and that aversion increases with question difficulty. Phelps, Doherty-Sneddon and Warnock even found that teaching children to look away while thinking improved their answers. Eye contact uses up some of our brain beans that might be better spent on actually working stuff out and saying the thing.

There’s psychophysiological and neurological evidence too. Hietanen’s (2018) review of affective eye contact shows how direct gaze reliably raises physiological arousal (in the psychophysiologist’s sense of heart rate, skin conductance and a sense of vigilance, not anything romantic): which is useful in some contexts, but arousal is not necessarily safety, and for many people it’s the opposite. Hadjikhani and colleagues (2017) found that constraining autistic participants in conversations to look at the eye region produced abnormally elevated activation in subcortical threat-processing systems. A number of studies, including Trevisan and colleagues (2017) have gathered first-hand accounts describing eye contact as intrusive, draining and aversive. 

We’ve heard from the psychologists and the neuroscientists; we should hear from the sociologists too. Erving Goffman described face-to-face interaction as a performance, and “face” for Goffman wasn’t just the area on the front of our head: it’s the social value we claim in an interaction, the image of ourselves as competent, reasonable, and worth listening to. “Face-work” is the continuous, mutual effort we all make to protect that image; our own and each other’s. And much of that work is conducted through our actual face, which is where threats to ourselves land and where we watch our words land on other people. With difficult conversations, the hard things worth saying are almost always threats to someone’s face: ours, theirs, or both. Facing each other, we watch the exact moment our words reach the other person and the ripples they make in their facial topography; a flinch or a fleeting frown. Reduce the facing, and we reduce the price of speaking for everyone involved.

Forced eye contact therefore, as we described in our last article on it, is for many people a stressor rather than a connector. So that being the case, as well as throwing out a lot of popular leadership advice, what can we do?

Side-by-side conversations

I have a good friend, Glen, who’s a walking therapist, and there’s a great deal of literature on the effectiveness of “side-by-side” conversations and disclosure, in part by reducing any perceived hierarchy, but in larger part by the necessary reduction in eye contact; it’s hard to maintain eye contact while we’re walking with someone, at least for any more than a few seconds before we walk into a tree or lamppost. As Glen describes, there are many benefits from walking therapy, including the calming effects of movement, being in the natural world, and walking itself can help free us from any sensations of feeling “stuck”. Therapists practising walk-and-talk formats consistently report that walking side by side, with minimal eye contact, helps clients open up (McKinney, 2011; Cooley, Jones, Kurtz and Robertson, 2020). And walking tends to occur in public, and connects to Goffman’s “civil inattention” concept; the implicit social permission for our eyes to wander and for our attention to be momentarily or slightly elsewhere.

And of course Freud’s infamous couch was itself an eye contact reduction strategy — he stated openly that he couldn’t bear being stared at all day, but the design also freed the patient to be more candid. He positioned himself out of sight so the patient’s associations and discourse wouldn’t be shaped by his facial reactions; a continuous stream of micro-verdicts that steer or suppress the conversation. 

“I cannot put up with being stared at by other people for eight hours a day (or more). Since, while I am listening to the patient, I, too, give myself over to the current of my unconscious thoughts, I do not wish my expressions of face to give the patient material for interpretations or to influence him in what he tells me.”
– Freud. “On Beginning the Treatment” (1913) pp123-144

The Men’s Sheds movement even made it a slogan: “men don’t talk face to face, they talk shoulder to shoulder“. Polly Wiessner’s PNAS study of Ju/’hoansi firelight talk is a delightful study of deep and meaningful conversation: daytime talk among the Ju/’hoan (!Kung) Bushmen of southern Africa was largely economic and practical, whilst fireside talk (with everyone facing the flames rather than each other) was where stories were shared and social imagination happened. Triangulating our most intimate conversations around a third point of focus is likely primeval.

On walking and creativity, Oppezzo and Schwartz (2014) found creative ideation was consistently higher while walking than sitting, indoors or out, and persisted after sitting back down. So if our conversations are intended to surface new ideas, maybe going for a walk is better than collectively standing in front of a whiteboard.

Designed for disclosure

None of this is new. We’ve been designing eye contact out of some of our most difficult conversations for centuries; occasionally on purpose. The confessional booth is a 450-year-old piece of psychological safety architecture: after the Council of Trent, Carlo Borromeo’s design specifications introduced the grille precisely to engineer better disclosure. Samaritans and other crisis lines are maybe a telephonic descendant, whilst barbers’ and hairdressers’ chairs (with eye contact softened via a mirror), and conversations in the car, are where many powerful conversations are able to be had that might not be otherwise. It’s a well-known parent hack: driver and passenger both face the road, so that sustained eye contact is impossible and mildly dangerous, and there’s no social obligation to fill any silence. It may take a long drive, but the important stuff will likely come out, probably somewhere around junction 8 of the M4.

I do a similar thing with my daughter, who’s four years old. I have an extra seat for her on my mountain bike, with her own little handlebars, which means she can come on rides with me, facing forward, sitting in front of me between my arms. We have some great conversations like this, as well as some long periods of contemplative silence, and songs from “Frozen”. 

What all of these share is that the reduction in eye contact is a property of the setting and the context, not a request or accommodation we have to make. Nobody in a walking meeting has to explain why they’re not looking at you. Nobody in the car has to disclose that they’re neurodivergent and struggle with eye contact, or that direct eye contact is interpreted as disrespect in the culture they grew up in. The accommodation is a side effect of the context (even though it may be intentional). Asking people to disclose their needs beforehand may be requiring them to do something that does not yet feel safe to do. 

Interestingly, the traditional police interview room, a space that is architected to produce pressure, is centred around forced facing. With its plain furniture, chairs facing each other, and nothing else to look at but the interviewer’s face, the design of the space is part of the “Reid Interrogation Technique”. So the arrangement that many LinkedIn posts prescribe for psychological safety is the one interrogators choose for pressure.  

The converse effect of low eye contact

It isn’t all good news for the power of reducing eye contact. There’s a converse effect too: Lapidot-Lefler & Barak found that absence of eye contact was the single factor with a major effect on inducing ‘flaming’ and aggressive behaviour online. Their 2015 follow-up also found that anonymity, invisibility and lack of eye contact significantly increased self-disclosure. The point is that reduced eye contact lowers the cost of candour and of cruelty. 

The difference lies in what goes alongside the reduced eye contact. The walk and the car pair it with being physically together, moving in the same direction, experiencing the same thing (the sun, rain, car radio, etc). The anonymous forum pairs it with near-invisibility and possibly a disposable online identity. So it isn’t simply “remove eye contact”; it’s “rethink the visual context while keeping people together”.

I’ll caveat this too. As someone with a stutter, telephone calls terrify me. Because the only means of communication in a telephone conversation is verbal, that’s the entire focus of the other person’s attention. The phone strips out eye contact, but it also strips out visual co-presence with it. The other person’s attention is entirely on the thing that I’m anxious about (voice), and they can’t see that I’m still there, thinking about what to say, how to say it, or getting over a short block. They might think the call has been disconnected, or they might simply get frustrated with me. So personally, I prefer video calls over phone calls – whilst appreciating that for others, it may be the other way around. 

Choice over prescription

So we can actually foster psychological safety through reducing eye contact, whether that’s side by side walking together, going for a drive, or using a confessional booth (would be unorthodox – let me know if you try it). Or maybe it’s triangulation, talking whilst focusing on another thing, whether it’s studying a whiteboard or roasting potatoes in a campfire. Some things are easier said to a potato than a face. 

But as always, it’s more complex than that. Lipreaders and people with hearing difficulties often need to see faces, walking conversations may exclude some people, cars are private and the person who’s driving has a degree of power-over, and some conversations might not be suitable for outdoors where other people might overhear. And some people, in some moments, genuinely want, or need, to be looked at. 

The effects of eye contact are different across people and contexts, so I believe that the way forward is towards optionality: choice, consent, and multiple formats. The prescription to maintain eye contact fails because it’s a prescription; and replacing it with a prescription to avoid eye contact would be flawed in exactly the same way. What we can do is to create environments, platforms and practices in which people, including us, can regulate their own eye contact without penalty, and without explanation. 

Further reading

• Psychological safety doesn’t look the same to everyone
• (Don’t) Look me in the Eye: The Challenge of Eye Contact
• Not Feeling Seen: Eye Contact and Psychological Safety
• Speaking Up: Neurodiversity & Dyspraxia
• Stuttering and Stammering
• You Have a Body

References

Argyle, M. and Dean, J. (1965) Eye-contact, distance and affiliation. Sociometry, 28(3), pp. 289–304. doi:10.2307/2786027

Cooley, S.J., Jones, C.R., Kurtz, A. and Robertson, N. (2020) ‘Into the Wild’: A meta-synthesis of talking therapy in natural outdoor spaces. Clinical Psychology Review, 77, 101841. doi:10.1016/j.cpr.2020.101841

Doherty-Sneddon, G. and Phelps, F.G. (2005) Gaze aversion: A response to cognitive or social difficulty? Memory & Cognition, 33(4), pp. 727–733. doi:10.3758/BF03195338

Doherty-Sneddon, G., Bruce, V., Bonner, L., Longbotham, S. and Doyle, C. (2002) Development of gaze aversion as disengagement from visual information. Developmental Psychology, 38(3), pp. 438–445. 

Freud, S. (1913) On Beginning the Treatment. In: The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. XII. London: Hogarth Press, pp. 121–144.

Glenberg, A.M., Schroeder, J.L. and Robertson, D.A. (1998) Averting the gaze disengages the environment and facilitates remembering. Memory & Cognition, 26(4), pp. 651–658.

Goffman, E. (1955) On Face-Work: An Analysis of Ritual Elements in Social Interaction. Psychiatry, 18(3), pp. 213–231. Reprinted in Interaction Ritual: Essays on Face-to-Face Behavior (1967). New York: Anchor Books.

Goffman, E. (1959) The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York: Anchor Books. 

Goffman, E. (1963) Behavior in Public Places: Notes on the Social Organization of Gatherings. New York: Free Press. 

Golding, B. (ed.) (2021) Shoulder to Shoulder: Broadening the Men’s Shed Movement. Champaign, IL: Common Ground Research Networks. 

Hadjikhani, N., Åsberg Johnels, J., Zürcher, N.R., et al. (2017) Look me in the eyes: constraining gaze in the eye-region provokes abnormally high subcortical activation in autism. Scientific Reports, 7, 3163. doi:10.1038/s41598-017-03378-5

Hietanen, J.K. (2018) Affective Eye Contact: An Integrative Review. Frontiers in Psychology, 9, 1587. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2018.01587

Inbau, F.E., Reid, J.E., Buckley, J.P. and Jayne, B.C. (2013) Criminal Interrogation and Confessions. 5th edn. Burlington, MA: Jones & Bartlett Learning. 

John E. Reid and Associates (2010) Designing an Interview/Interrogation Room. Investigator Tips. Available at: https://reid.com/resources/investigator-tips/designing-an-interview-interrogation-room

Kajimura, S. and Nomura, M. (2016) When we cannot speak: Eye contact disrupts resources available to cognitive control processes during verb generation. Cognition, 157, pp. 352–357. doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2016.10.002

Lapidot-Lefler, N. and Barak, A. (2012) Effects of anonymity, invisibility, and lack of eye-contact on toxic online disinhibition. Computers in Human Behavior, 28(2), pp. 434–443. doi:10.1016/j.chb.2011.10.014

Lapidot-Lefler, N. and Barak, A. (2015) The benign online disinhibition effect: Could situational factors induce self-disclosure and prosocial behaviors? Cyberpsychology: Journal of Psychosocial Research on Cyberspace, 9(2), article 3. doi:10.5817/CP2015-2-3

McKinney, B.L. (2011) Therapists’ perceptions of walk and talk therapy: A grounded theory study. Doctoral dissertation, University of New Orleans.

Oppezzo, M. and Schwartz, D.L. (2014) Give your ideas some legs: The positive effect of walking on creative thinking. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 40(4), pp. 1142–1152. doi:10.1037/a0036577

Phelps, F.G., Doherty-Sneddon, G. and Warnock, H. (2006) Functional benefits of children’s gaze aversion during questioning. British Journal of Developmental Psychology, 24(3), pp. 577–588. doi:10.1348/026151005X49872

Trevisan, D.A., Roberts, N., Lin, C. and Birmingham, E. (2017) How do adults and teens with self-declared Autism Spectrum Disorder experience eye contact? A qualitative analysis of first-hand accounts. PLOS ONE, 12(11), e0188446. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0188446

Wiessner, P.W. (2014) Embers of society: Firelight talk among the Ju/’hoansi Bushmen. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 111(39), pp. 14027–14035. doi:10.1073/pnas.1404212111

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