Gaze Shifts and Person Perception
Isabel Acosta 2007-49035
You've seen it before, guy walks in room and suddenly, his eyes focus on this one girl, and their eyes suddenly lock. If the girl looks away, and then discretely looks back, the guy smiles --he knows he has a shot. But how does he know??
Detecting and interpreting gaze cues are skills that human beings are so naturally good at. Gaze cues are so central to all our human interactions. We categorize people by merely looking at them, or by judging how they look at us. We extremely value encounters with people who we have made eye contact with. We put so much meaning in them and from these cues, we base our next actions or responses -- it "facilitates the generation of a contextually appropriate behavioral response". Isn't that so amazing?? From looking at these cues, we can find out the other person's intentions, motivations, and even what the person wants us to do (or not do). The eyes are just so important to social cognition and communication, and it is crucial for humans to have a kind of information processing that can decode such cues.
What do you think she's trying tot tell you with this look?
It was found that infants have been fascinated with the eyes, and that at 4 months, they are already able to differentiate between a direct gaze and an averted gaze. At 9-18 months, they are already able to tell if an adult's intentions are ambiguous through their eyes. Scientists have also already found out that specific brain regions become activated when processing gaze cues, such as the superior temporal sulcus, amygdala, medial prefrontal cortex and ventral striatum (related to prediction of reward and punishment). Although much has been researched on the neuroscience of gaze processing, apparently, little is known about how gaze cues can affect a person's perception. Mason, Tatkow and Macrae (2005) try to find out if gaze cues, specifically gaze shifts, affect a person's likability and attractiveness perception of a target.
Direct and averted gaze
The researchers conducted two very simple and straightforward experiments. They asked 24 women and 19 men from Dartmouth College to rate 38 female faces (with neutral expressions) whether they were likeable (1) to extremely likable (5). The pictures where displayed for 2,000 ms, and then afterwards, the participants were given some time to rate them. The pictures were animated in two ways, they appeared to be looking at the participant, or they appeared to be looking away from the participant. If the participant was placed in the attention-away condition, in the first 1,000 ms, the picture they saw displayed a direct gaze, and then changed to averted gaze (eyes looking left or right) for the remaining 1,000 ms. The opposite occurred for the attention-toward condition. So, the researchers specifically made sure the gaze shifts was the only differing variable.
Results showed that ratings of likability were high when social attention was directed toward rather than away from the participants. "Targets were evaluated more favorably when gaze shifts signaled attentional engagement," regardless of sex (male or female0. The researchers were curious --does judgmental relevance of targets affect the effects of gaze shifts? What if the judgement needed is irrelevant to a particular sex (female) like physical attractiveness of the female models, will the same results be observed? The researchers then conducted a second experiment to find out if judgment relevance moderates the effects of gaze shifts.
Which ad is more appealing?
In the second experiment, the same methods were employed, except that this time they had to rate the targets/pictures from 1 (attractive) to 5 (extremely attractive). The researchers found that the participant's sex had a main effect --males found the targets more attractive than the females did. They also found that ratings of attractiveness were way higher when social attention was directed toward rather than away from male raters, which was not observed in the female raters. They concluded that when the requested judgment was more relevant to men than women, only men were influenced by gaze shifts when evaluating the targets.
Although I am pretty troubled with the validity of the effect of sex in judging attractiveness (were the participants all heterosexuals?) and the heterosexist bias that physical attractiveness of females is a judgment only relevant to males, I was impressed with the implications of the study. It is certainly interesting how much information we can get and transmit just by LOOKING at people, and how much this acquired information affects our perceptions. "Decoding the language of the eyes streamlines the complex process of everyday social interaction. It is an ability that lies at the very heart of human social cognition." So much can be assumed just by these looks!! Gaze direction also influences person construal, because it moderates our social attention. If someone or something is interesting, we direct our gaze in its direction. This signaling of the locus of attention conveys information about its importance to the perceiver. Furthermore, patterns of gaze direction, or shifts in gazes signal changes in social attention, which has implied social meaning. If you make eye contact with someone, and then the person hurriedly looks away and does not look back, how do you perceive this person? The researchers concluded that "gaze shifts modulate people’s evaluations of others, and that this effect is shaped by the interplay of several factors, which includes the status of the target (i.e., cue provider), the identity of the perceiver, and the nature of the judgment under consideration." The researchers emphasized that judgmental context or relationship that exists between the perceiver changes how gazes affect our person perception. Gaze shifts are sensitive to context. This makes a lot of sense to me and is such an significant note to remember. Our perceptions of people, and any other stimuli really, are always taken in the light of the context of the situation or environment they are in, and they are subject to the current situation of the person perceiving them --which includes past experiences, memories, values, beliefs, biases etcetera. It is so interesting for me how everything does not occur by itself --everything dynamically interacts with each other and these elements cannot be separated from each other.
It is so cool that decoding these eye cues come so naturally to us. It is so automatically hardwired in our social brains that the eyes and its gazes contain a lot of meaning. It is so amazing how our brains are equipped with such a kind of information processing system that can figure out the meanings of such subtle cues! We are truly beautifully constructed species.
So, remember to think before you look --you never know what message you're signaling from your gaze.
Source: Mason, M. F., Tatkow, E. P., & Macrae, C. N. (2005). The Look of Love: Gaze Shifts and Person Perception. Psychological Science , 16 (3), 236-239.
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