Direct Eye Contact Best When Making Request
Christopher Philip
French researchers Nicolas Guéguen and Céline Jacob have discovered that maintaining eye contact when making a request is best and looking away only leads to poorer outcomes.
Many previous studies have found that eye contact leads to better outcomes in persuasive tasks. Specifically, direct eye contact leads people to stop for a motorists, return a lost coin to place a phone call, help pick up dropped items and donate money more readily to a solicitor.
That being the case, it has never been studied as to whether maintaining eye contact throughout the request is better than an evasive glance.
The current experiment was simple. The confederates were instructed to approach pedestrians on the street and politely say “Excuse me, madam (or sir). I am a student, and my marketing teacher asked us to do a survey on natural products. Would you mind answering a few questions?” The confederate then either (a) looked the participants in the eye and maintained eye contact throughout the request or (b) used an evasive glance, first looking at the participants and then averting their gaze as soon as the participants looked at them. In this condition the confederate repeated eye contact or evasive glances several times during the request.
Results showed that success rates, as mentioned earlier, were much better for the confederates who maintained direct eye contact. When eye contact was maintained, there was a 66% success rate. However, when evasive glances took place, only 34% of the people complied with the request.
Interestingly, in the direct eye-contact condition, 76% of the women consented to the request, as opposed to only 56% of men. The reverse was true in the evasive glance condition where 24% of women complied to the request, as opposed to 44% of the men.
Guéguen and Jacob report in their paper that “Similar to touch, direct eye contact may lead to a more positive perception of the requester – a perception that, in turn, may lead to greater compliance with the request.”
The researchers do not elaborate on why the women were more likely to help when confederates used direct eye contact rather than when they didn’t, however, it may have something to do with the level of authority and dominance expressed through direct versus evasive eye contact. Asking for help from a woman, yields much more powerful results when one maintains eye contact and thus authority. Men, on the other hand, had more similar results regardless of maintaining eye contact or not, thus it seems that eye contact is not a way that men can be influenced to comply.
Overall, however, gender omitted, eye contact was the best way to create helping behaviour and produced the greatest likelihood of eliciting compliance.
Image Credit: Matthew G
Resources
Nicolas Guéguen and Céline Jacob. Direct Look Versus Evasive Glance and Compliance With a Request, The Journal of Social Psychology. 2002.142(3): 393-396. DOI: 10.1080/00224540209603907. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00224540209603907