Eye Contact: Not As Persuasive As We Thought
Look At Me When I'm Talking To You! Guido Reni, The Yorck Project via Wikimedia Commons Here's a lesson straight out of my high school speech class: When making an argument, make eye contact with your audience. Connect with people. Stare deeply into the depths of their soul and convince them you're right. Except new research suggests that that might be exactly the opposite of what you want to do to be persuasive. According to a study from the University of British Columbia, the University of Freiburg in Germany and the Harvard Kennedy school, locking eyes with someone discussing controversial views actually made the listener less likely to be persuaded by the speaker's argument. In one experiment, this study used remote eye-tracking to record where the subjects (20 university students working for course credit) were looking as they watched several videos featuring people...