Length of Eye Contact People Find Most Comfortable
By BPS Research Digest, July 17, 2016
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It’s a dilemma extremely familiar to anyone with social anxiety – for how long to make eye contact before looking away? The fear is that if you only ever fix the other person’s gaze for very brief spells then you’ll look shifty. If you lock on for too long, on the other hand, then there’s the risk of seeming creepy. Thankfully a team of British researchers has now conducted the most comprehensive study of what people generally regard as a comfortable length of eye contact.
For the research published in Royal Society Open Science, Nicola Binetti and his colleagues recruited nearly 500 visitors to the London Science Museum from 56 nations – 224 of them were male and their ages ranged from 11 to 79 years, with an average age of 30.
On average, the participants were most comfortable with eye contact that lasted just over three seconds. Looking at the distribution of preferences, the vast majority of participants preferred a duration between two and five seconds. No-one preferred eye contact durations of less than a second or longer than nine seconds.
