why eye contact is important?

• Eye contact helps you to concentrate.
• You will look less confident.
• People will stop listening to you.
• Message sent and accepted.
• Making people feel more engaged.

Like facial expressions, body language, and gestures, eye contact is a non-verbal form of communication. All forms of nonverbal communication can either help or hinder communication. Good eye contact also makes others more likely to like and respect you, making it an important tool for building and maintaining relationships.

This article will help you learn more about the power of eye contact and give you tips on how to use eye contact in communication in an effective way.

Most researchers agree that eye contact is the most important form of non-verbal communication because it has the most impact on how another person feels about you and what you’re saying. Making too much or too little eye contact can send mixed signals, discredit what you’re saying, or even be interpreted as a sign of disrespect.

During a conversation, you can use eye contact as a tool to help you communicate more effectively. Making eye contact with someone during a conversation is one of the best ways to ensure that:

Eye contact can either support or discredit the words you say. When you don’t make good eye contact with someone you are talking to, other people are less likely to listen and understand what you’re saying, and miscommunications are more likely to occur. Eye contact has several functions when you are the one speaking.

When you are speaking to someone, good eye contact helps to:

Eye contact is equally helpful when someone else is talking to you. Avoiding eye contact with someone who you’re in a conversation with can send them the message that you aren’t listening to them and can even be seen as rude.

When someone else is speaking, making eye contact with them helps to:

There are many ways that a lack of eye contact can negatively impact communication, making misunderstandings more likely to occur. Not making eye contact with someone in a conversation can also lead people to believe you aren’t listening or interested in what they say and can even offend someone.

When you avoid making eye contact with someone you are communicating with, it can:

A person’s eye contact and gaze can also tell you a lot about their personality, status, and confidence level. We can also use eye contact to figure out how someone feels and whether they like or dislike us based on their eye contact.

Here are some of the different things you may be able to learn about someone based on how much or how little eye contact they make:

Compared to other forms of nonverbal communication, eye contact is believed to have the most significant role in how much other people like and trust you. Your eyes send strong emotional signals to other people that can make them feel either closer to you or more distant from you.

Depending on a person’s background, culture, and individual preferences, some people are more or less comfortable with eye contact. In some instances, people will become uncomfortable or threatened when you make too much eye contact, and in other cases, they will be offended when you avoid eye contact. Social cues can help you understand when a person is comfortable or uncomfortable with the amount of eye contact you’re making with them.

How much eye contact you make and how long you hold someone’s gaze will depend on the type of interaction and also the kind of relationship you have with the person. Depending on the situation, making too much or too little eye contact in conversations can send the wrong message to someone.

Generally, you will make more eye contact with people you are closest to and in high-stakes conversations than you will in more casual interactions with strangers or acquaintances.

Aim for more or less eye contact depending on the situation, and use the chart below as a guide:

Typically, you should try to make more eye contact when you are listening and less when you are speaking unless it is a particularly important conversation or you’re delivering a speech. Some professionals advise using the 50/70 rule, which is to aim to make eye contact 50% of the time you are speaking and 70% of the time you are listening.

Eye contact should always be used in combination with other nonverbal communication skills to make sure you are sending the message you intend to send. Here are some tips on how to combine eye contact with other nonverbal cues:

Because it’s common for people to feel nervous when speaking in public or in front of large crowds, some people avoid making eye contact with the audience. Unfortunately, this can make your speech or presentation a lot less impactful.

When you are delivering a speech or presenting in public, making eye contact helps you be seen as an effective and engaging speaker.

When you avoid making eye contact during a public speech, you are more likely to:

There are certain do’s and don’ts when it comes to making eye contact during a public speech or presentation. Some of these are aimed at helping you feel more comfortable and less nervous, while others are intended to help you deliver your speech effectively.

Here are some tips on how to make good eye contact in public speaking:

Eye contact plays a key role in sexual attraction and intimacy. Knowing what kinds of eye contact are used to convey sexual interest or attraction can help you understand when someone is interested in you and also can prevent you from accidentally sending mixed signals to people.

Eye contact is often used to signal sexual interest and attraction and to check if the attraction is mutual. In public or social settings, making prolonged eye contact with a stranger is often a signal of mutual sexual interest and attraction.

If you are interested and attracted to the person looking at you, holding their gaze makes it more likely they will approach you. If you are not interested or are in a committed monogamous relationship, holding the gaze of a stranger for too long can invite unwanted advances.

If you are approached by someone who you are sexually attracted to or interested in, eye contact is one of the best ways to send clear signals to the other person. Holding their gaze for a few seconds, looking away briefly, looking back, and smiling is often interpreted as flirting.

Even looking at someone you are attracted to across a crowded room to catch their gaze can be a way of flirting with them, especially if you’ve had other flirtatious interactions with one another. This kind of flirting is often recognized by other people, so avoid these kinds of obvious cues when you are trying to be discreet.

Eye contact is also linked to sexual and romantic intimacy. Locking eyes with someone during sex or foreplay often increases mutual feelings of attraction. Tracking facial expressions during sex can also let you know if they are enjoying sex. In these ways, making eye contact during sex is a good way to be an attentive sexual partner.

Eye contact etiquette is not the same in all situations, and different kinds of eye contact can mean different things. Knowing the basics of eye contact etiquette and when to adjust how much eye contact you make is key to using this tool effectively.

In closer relationships, making eye contact with someone for 4-5 seconds before glancing away is normal, but this is way too long to look at a stranger or someone who you aren’t in a conversation with. The closer you are to someone, the more acceptable it is to make longer periods of eye contact with them.

Avoid making too much eye contact with strangers, as this can make them feel threatened or insecure. Make more eye contact with anyone you’re directly talking to, especially if it’s a 1:1 conversation. Watch for signs that they are comfortable, and adjust how much eye contact you make based on their body language.

Make more eye contact during high-stakes, formal, or professional interactions. For instance, eye contact in interviews or work presentations helps you make a good, lasting first impression. Good eye contact in a professional interaction also makes people more likely to see you as credible, trustworthy, and persuasive.

Because eye contact can have a multitude of functions in social interactions, it’s good to be able to interpret different cues people give you with their eyes. Below are some examples of eye contact cues and what they may mean in social interactions.

Below is a guide to reading and picking up on social cues that may indicate a need for less eye contact and cues that indicate you are making the right amount of eye contact:

Eye contact is often seen as one of the most important aspects of communication. Making too much eye contact or not enough eye contact can violate unspoken social norms and rules, offend someone, or make them uncomfortable. Learning basic eye contact etiquette can help you, but it’s also helpful to use your eyes to look for social cues and signs. Using your eyes can help you become better at communicating, relating, and connecting with other people.

Here are some answers to the most commonly asked questions about eye contact.

Yes. People who avert their eyes or avoid direct eye contact are often perceived as being insecure, nervous, or lacking in confidence. Making too much eye contact or staring at someone can even signal someone who is too confident and may be interpreted as a sign of aggression.

Prolonged eye contact can mean different things depending on the situation but does tend to send a strong message. For example, locking eyes with a stranger can be perceived as threatening or hostile or can be interpreted as a sign of sexual interest.

Eye contact can sometimes trigger self-consciousness or bring up personal insecurities. You may be more uncomfortable with eye contact if you are shy, introverted, or if you’re in an unfamiliar setting.

Avoiding eye contact can be a sign of anxiety, but it can also signal disinterest or dislike for a person or a conversation. In some cases, people avoid eye contact for less personal reasons, like when they’re distracted in a conversation or have something on their mind.

A person’s eyes can signal their emotions, so when they make eye contact, we can often tell what they are feeling. Research shows that most people are good at reading others’ eyes, picking up easily on various feelings, including boredom and playfulness.

Making eye contact helps both people focus on the conversation and read facial expressions. This can improve understanding. And improving understanding can significantly improve communication between two people.

Eye contact is one of the easiest and most powerful ways to make a person feel recognized, understood and validated.

The simple act of holding someone’s gaze — whether it’s a new girl, a prospective employer or an old friend — has the power to ignite or deepen a relationship.

That’s why it’s so important, and that’s why it’s one of the fundamental skills we emphasize so strongly at The Art of Charm.

To understand why eye contact is so important, we need to appreciate how central it is to the human experience. As it happens, humans — the only primates with white eyes — are drawn to eye contact from an early age.

A 2002 study from MIT found that infants were far more likely to try and follow an adult’s eyes rather than just their head movements. And beyond the science, think about your personal experience: We study people’s eyes to judge their character, we notice when someone meets our gaze, and we are highly conscious of where our eyes wander.

Eye contact is deeply rooted in our DNA. In fact, you’re reading this article in large part because your caveman ancestors had an intuitive mastery of eye contact. Back then, eye contact meant the difference between life and death, attraction and indifference.

And yet most people have never given any thought to how good or bad their eye contact is. If you want to become a master of eye contact, it’s going to take some practice, along with a good grasp of the underlying theory. And that’s the focus of this piece: five things every person should know about the science of eye contact, the benefits of mastering it, and how to make the most of your gaze.

Eye contact makes you more persuasive, right? Yes. But it can also have the opposite effect.

In many cases, people can be more resistant to persuasion when making eye contact, as researchers at the University of Freigburg, Germany found. Using the latest in eye-tracking technology, Frances Chen (now an assistant professor at the University of British Columbia) and her team of researchers found that the more eye contact subjects made with a video while they listened, the less likely they were to believe what was being said.

There are some caveats to this general rule. First, the study involved people watching videos about controversial subjects. Participants who disagreed with the viewpoint they were listening to were less likely to be persuaded by someone the more eye contact they made with the speaker.

This might be because liars are scientifically proven to hold more and deliberate eye contact than people telling the truth.

On the other hand, if someone already agreed with what was being said, they were likely to agree even more if they made steady, prolonged eye contact with the speaker.

In either scenario, we can appreciate how powerful eye contact really is. Someone’s gaze can be a channel of truth or a barometer of lies, depending on the speaker’s intent and the listener’s sensitivity. Both are communicated through the eyes.

The implications? For one thing, steady eye contact will help you motivate people to complete actions they’ve already agreed to undertake. It can also convince people to become more zealous about your mutual position.

If you’re seeking allies around the office, eye contact can be a powerful tool. If you’re a parent looking to instill discipline and connection in your children, it can be equally effective.

At the same time, if you feel like someone is trying to “sell” you on something you’re not all that interested in, then focus on making eye contact. This will make you less susceptible to a deceptive sales pitch. On the other hand, if you’re even a little bit interested, but still don’t want to buy, looking away might be to your advantage — more eye contact will just make you agree more.

If you want people to remember what you said long after you’re done talking, maintain good eye contact. This was the finding of a joint study between the University of Wolverhampton and the University of Stirling.

In this study, participants were put on a video call with another person. Researchers found that eye contact increased retention of what was said on the call. What’s more, this didn’t even require all that much eye contact: A mere 30% of time spent making eye contact added up to a significant increase in what participants remembered.

Which means that a little eye-gazing goes a long way. Making eye contact 30% of the time isn’t hard — that’s less than 20 seconds out of every minute. If you are working on making a lasting impression, or want your colleagues to remember your words long after a meeting, then find their gaze and hold it, because memory, impression and eye contact are deeply connected.

Eye contact alone doesn’t explain what makes your words memorable. Researchers have also found that movement, when coupled with eye contact, has a profound effect.

Two researchers working out of Radboud University and Rutgers University did the first research on eye contact and movement. What they found is that eye contact, coupled with a sudden movement (such as an out-of-nowhere hand motion or a turn of the head while you make eye contact) makes people both more memorable and more noticeable.

Changing your direction and making eye contact will help you make an even stronger impression. All you have to do is turn your head, move your hand onto the bar, or focus on strong body language as you make eye contact. That in turn will make you more noticeable and memorable.

Paradoxically, liars make more eye contact than truth tellers, but eye contact tends to make people more honest when confronted. That’s what researchers at Tufts University found when they left a dime in a phone booth and had strangers approach claiming the dime as their own. When eye contact was made, those who had just found a dime in the phone booth were far more likely to return it.

This phenomenon reflects the age-old “eyes as windows of the soul” concept. You know logically that someone can’t read your mind by looking into your eyes, and yet you intuitively know that eye contact makes it less likely that you will get away with lying. Our eyes give away way more about our internal processes than we might like.

If you’re dealing with someone you think is shady, holding eye contact can be a simple way to keep them honest. Even if you’re dealing with someone who isn’t deliberately trying to deceive you, eye contact can still be a power tool. Think, for example, about trying to buy a car. Your eye contact keeping the seller honest can help you to get vital information about the history of the car, or get them to offer you a more realistic starting figure.

Whatever the scenario, remember this: eye contact is fundamentally connected to our perceptions of truth and honesty.

French researchers at the University of Paris found that people are far more self-aware (defined as being more or less aware of what is going on with one’s physical body) when someone else makes eye contact than when they are not. The researchers believe that we become more focused on ourselves and aware of our behavior when others are looking at us.

There’s a thin line between self-awareness and self-consciousness, but being aware of this phenomenon can help you make the most of it. In the company of other people — in a meeting, at a party, on a date — you might find that someone’s eye contact makes you more sensitive to your own thoughts, feelings and behaviors. Once you notice that happening, you can check in with yourself and give a bit of thought to the impression you’re making. That is where self-consciousness heightened by eye contact can actually work for you.

You can also use your eye contact to heighten self-awareness in others. I certainly wouldn’t advise anyone to bully someone with eye contact, but what about maintaining eye contact with a girl you’re really getting along with? That cool, nervous butterflies feeling can be a lot of fun.

When you maintain eye contact with her, heightening her self-awareness in the process, you’re giving her a little gift. You’re allowing her to enjoy that feeling even more. And you’re communicating a number of important things: that you’re listening, that you’re paying attention, and that you want her to enjoy the present moment with you.

You’re also doing something essential, because …

Hold onto your hats, gents. What I’m about to tell you will make you love eye contact: eye contact will make people like you. Because according to research, holding someone’s gaze has been proven to create attraction.

And while you might know that a winning smile is a great way to appear attractive, putting direct eye contact behind that winning smile is your best bet, says one study conducted by Aberdeen University in Scotland. It seems that looking directly at someone does most of the work in creating attraction, and dramatically enhances other behaviors like smiling, touching and listening.

What’s more, smiling while making eye contact has the most power when talking to women, according to the researchers. “What we’ve shown is that people seem to like someone who likes them – based on the direction of their gaze – and it’s particularly true of the opposite sex.” (My emphasis.)

However, while it might be more powerful with women, it will also have an impact when you’re meeting new people at work, networking or making friends in a new city. Eye contact is universal.

So whether you’re hustling to meet new people or trying to deepen a connection you already have, smile big, make eye contact and go straight after what you want. It won’t always be easy, but it’s the best strategy you have.

“Love at first sight” is apparently a real thing. But here’s the deal: it only works on your end. Researchers using hidden cameras found that men who stared at a woman for 8.2 seconds or more were far more likely to feel like they had fallen in love at first sight.

On the other hand, if a man looked at woman for 4.5 seconds or less, he was likely to not have any interest in her at all. There’s just one problem: The women did not reciprocate the men’s amorous feeling. It was all in the man’s head.

Eye contact (also known as “direct gaze”) is a valuable part of nonverbal communication. Our brains have developed to pay close attention to eye contact and the messages that it conveys. Through eye contact, we can gather communication cues about tone, emotional state, turn-taking and more.

While we don’t necessarily speak with our eyes, we use them to send and receive messages. For example, many of us have had a partner, sibling or friend give us a look that spoke for itself. But how big of a role does eye contact play in how we communicate?

To fully understand how eye contact is used in communication, it’s important to consider other factors as well. Cultural background and the specifics of a situation play key roles in how we interpret eye contact and what meaning it carries.

At the most basic level, making eye contact with someone means you see them and acknowledge their presence. Eye contact may seem like a simple act, but it carries a different meaning depending on where you are in the world.

Western European cultures believe maintaining eye contact is a sign of respect.  They’re also more likely to search for and detect eye contact during social interactions.

Eye contact is felt differently in many Eastern Asian cultures. People practice avoiding eye contact with others because it’s seen as disrespectful. Residents of Japan often teach their children to look at a person’s neck when they’re speaking to them. This still allows for the person’s face and eyes to fall within the child’s peripheral vision but is less direct than eye contact.

Extensive research has been done on how the brain responds to eye contact. Linking eyes with someone — even if it’s a stranger — has a powerful effect on our focus ability, social development and anatomical response.

It’s hypothesized that the human eye's structure has evolved over time. The changes accommodate our need for social interaction and coordinated behavior with others.

Unlike that of other primates, the human eye has the brightness of the sclera (whites of the eye) contrasting with the darkness of the pupil. This contrast allows us to recognize which direction the eye is focused. It also helps us determine whether we have another person’s attention.

Research to better understand eye contact’s effect on human response found that:

One study measuring the brain’s reaction to eye contact found that parts of the brain lit up in response to eye contact. These areas controlled intentionality processing and cognitive tasks, such as:

This study also found that humans prefer eye contact over-focusing on a person’s mouth as they speak. This may suggest that mouth fixation stimulates the parts of the brain listed above, similar to the way that eye contact does.

SEE RELATED: The importance of eye contact for child development

It can be distracting when the person you’re talking to appears focused on something besides your conversation. This is because we rely on observing other people’s eyes to draw conclusions about their mental and emotional states and the focus of their attention.

Research suggests that we use our knowledge of eye function to decode eye behavior. For example, when the eyes are narrowed, it improves visual acuity so we can discriminate smaller details. So, when we see someone else narrow their eyes in response to something we said, we assume they are trying to analyze and better understand the details of the message.

SEE RELATED: Can eye movements indicate lying?

Similarly, we open our eyes wide to allow for more light, which can help us detect any potential threats. This function causes us to associate wide eyes with fear or shock.

Eye contact helps us understand the tone of the messages we send and receive. It also helps us navigate the conversation. During conversation, we keep track of the gaze signals we give off. At the same time, we're also decoding the gaze signals the other person is sending us.

It’s suggested that our gaze during conversation depends on the sub-task we’re performing: speaking or listening. People often look for eye cues to let them know when speaking will begin. As the person speaking sends gaze signals related to speaking, the person listening sends reception signals that communicate attention and engagement.

Making eye contact during conversation can notify the other person that your turn to speak is coming to an end and signals them to respond. It can also be used as a nudge to regain the attention of your conversation partner.

Research suggests that we use eye contact subconsciously, but precisely, throughout conversation. This is to make the most of the shared attention between parties. The more eye contact, the more engaged each party is in the conversation.

SEE RELATED: Is social media making eye contact a rarity?

There are several reasons eye contact could make someone uncomfortable. However, avoiding direct gaze is a common characteristic of social anxiety.

Researchers have studied social anxiety and eye contact to gain an understanding of how a natural response can cause stress and fear in some.

People who have social anxiety disorder have a serious fear of being criticized. This causes them stress and self-consciousness in social situations.

They often have attentional bias when processing negative or rejection-related social cues. In other words, they are more likely to notice a negative cue over a positive one. Another characteristic of someone with social anxiety is to view unfamiliar social situations as threatening. This makes their experience of new and unfamiliar environments very stressful.

Other reasons someone avoids eye contact may include:

It’s possible to manage social anxiety with prescription medication and/or therapy. As a more informal strategy, it is also entirely possible to have a conversation while making minimal eye contact. If someone you know lives with social anxiety and finds it difficult to keep eye contact, they will probably appreciate it if you don’t pressure them to do so. Instead, be patient and allow them to communicate in the way that makes them most comfortable. Just because they’re not looking into your eyes does not mean they’re not listening to you.

SEE RELATED: How vision loss can impact mental health, and how you can help

For those looking to improve their eye contact skills, try a few of these tips the next time you’re in a social setting.

These habits likely won’t develop overnight. It’s important to practice them with people you’re most comfortable with first. Over time, you’ll build confidence in making eye contact and building relationships with new people.

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