By Dr. Ken Broda Bahm:
It is one of the most enshrined principles of human communication: The audience and the speaker should be locked in eye contact in order for the best persuasion to take place. Public speaking teachers give that advice to students and jury consultants give that advice to attorneys and witnesses: Look those jurors right in the eye. But a recent EurekAlert! on new research caught my eye. Entitled, “Eye Contact May Make People More Resistant to Persuasion,” the press release described a new study in the journal Psychological Science that seems to upend that time-honored principle. Using eye tracking technology, the experiment (Chen et al., 2013) demonstrated that the more research participants looked at a speaker’s eyes, the less persuaded they were by the speaker’s argument. This turned out to be true, both when participants were naturally observing and also when they were instructed to give the speakers eye contact. “Contrary to cultural belief and suggestions of some prior research,” they write, “eye contact decreases the success of persuasive attempts.”
I am all for new research overturning even the most cherished bits of received wisdom. But in this case, I don’t think these results should lead litigators to embrace a purposeful avoidance of eye contact in the courtroom. Instead, I believe that once the study and its methods are more fully understood, it carries a different kind of message for attorneys and witnesses in court. In my view, it speaks to how we interpret audience feedback, but not how we practice as speakers. That is, I think it gives us more reason to avoid overinterpreting a juror’s eye contact with us, while leaving alone the general, and in my view, very good advice for witnesses and attorneys to aim to maintain good eye contact with jurors.
What the Study Shows
A team of researchers from the Wharton School and the University of Freiburg in Germany set out to see if eyes led to ‘ayes’ in the form of better persuasion. To test that, they conducted two experiments. In the first experiment, they measured participants’ (German university students) attitudes on several hot-button topics (e.g., university fees, gender quotas, assisted suicide, nuclear energy), then had them watch a persuasive message on the subject while using newly developed eye tracking technology to see where exactly the participants were looking. What they found was that spending more time looking at the speaker’s eyes was only associated with greater persuasion among those who already agreed with the speaker to begin with. For those who began the project disagreeing with the speaker (the tougher audience), those who spent more time looking at the speaker’s eyes were even less persuaded than those who didn’t.
That first study could be explained in the reverse causal direction: Instead of eye contact causing resistance to persuasion, resistance to persuasion could be causing greater eye contact (like staring down an opponent, for example). So to guard against this possibility, the team conducted a second experiment. In this one, they randomly told one group of participants to focus on the speaker’s eyes, while telling another group to look at the mouth. The result? The eye focusers ended up being less persuaded at the end of the project.
The team interprets these results as reasons to doubt the effectiveness of eye contact as part of a persuasive strategy. “There is a lot of cultural lore about the power of eye contact as an influence tool,” lead researcher Frances Chen is quoted in EurekAlert!, “But our findings show that direct eye contact makes skeptical listeners less likely to change their minds, not more, as previously believed.” But again, I think we need to take a step back before we translate this into general advice for legal persuaders to avoid eye contact.
The Trouble With Eye Contact
As the researchers note, eye contact, like every other aspect of nonverbal communication, conveys many meanings: anything from friendliness, connection, attention, intimacy, defiance or even hostility. What it means in any given case always depends on context. So what was the context of the study? In the first study, in which participants without instruction spent more or less time looking at the video-recorded speaker’s eyes, we can’t know exactly why they did. In the second study, the context was that participants were told to stare at the speaker’s eyes. So that may say more about a situation in which attention is commanded (“look at me when I’m talking to you”) than when it is naturally invited by a speaker and given by an audience.
What the Study Doesn’t Show
Fundamentally, the limit on this study is that it looked only at the eye contact from the audience. In the videos, the speaker was either looking directly into the camera or angled slightly away from it. Because the researchers did not focus on it, we do not know what the effect would have been when comparing a speaker giving minimal versus maximum eye contact to an audience. Past studies (See Segrin, 1993) have looked at that question, though, and have shown that a speaker’s gaze plays an important role in persuasion. What I hope the researchers will do next would be a manipulation looking at both the speaker and the audience. This would mean creating an otherwise identical pair of messages, one in which the speaker is giving consistent eye contact, and one in which the speaker isn’t. Ideally, this should be done using live communication, since it stands to reason that we probably use eye contact differently when we know that the target of our eye contact can see us as well. The study should also still track the eye contact of the listener as well. Finally, the meaning of eye contact naturally varies by culture, so testing with American jury-eligible participants would make sense as well. Following that method, there will be a greater possibility of determining what the true effects of speaker/audience eye contact is when it is conceived as a two-way street in a way most relevant to American legal persuasion.
So, What Should Courtroom Communicators Do?
In the meantime, while the research continues, should persuaders relax about eye contact? I say, “yes, and no.” Look at your audience while speaking, but don’t assume those looking back are necessarily in your corner.
When Trying to Face Read Jurors, Don’t Mistake ‘Looking’ for ‘Liking’
As a speaker, eye contact generally feels good. “They’re listening to me! They like me!” the speaker feels. It is understandable for speakers to believe that the audience member who is giving us full eye contact is doing so because they’re supportive. That can lead the attorney after opening to say, “We’ve got Juror 5 in our pocket” or the witness during testimony to feel, “Juror 3 is really understanding this.” But you shouldn’t trust that feeling. I’ve written before about the inherent imprecision of nonverbal communication, and eye contact is no exception to that. They may be looking at you because they like you, or they may be looking at you because they are skeptical of you. Or they may be looking at you simply because they were taught to be polite and attentive listeners. You’ll know which at the end of the trial, but in the meantime, don’t overinterpret and don’t let it distract you.
When Presenting or Testifying, Keep Looking
The trouble with research descriptions is that they can lead to some snap judgments. Blogs, this one included, risk fueling a tendency to accept findings as facts. In this case, I think there are enough differences between the study that was done and the study that could have assessed a speaker’s and audience’s mutual eye contact, that it makes sense to continue doing what intuition and experience supports: Look at the person you are trying to persuade. For witnesses, that means looking at the individual jurors in the jury box when testifying. For attorneys, that means visually connecting with the panel whenever you have a chance to do so. Those who return your eye contact might be doing so because they agree with you, or, as this study suggests, because they don’t. But you still show yourself to be open, direct, confident, honest, and engaged by aiming to give your eye contact to them.
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Other Posts on Nonverbal Communications:
- Don’t Be Too Sure About Face Reading Your Jury
- Adapt to Inconsistent Assessments of Witness Demeanor
- Negotiate, Mediate (and Testify) Eye to Eye
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Chen, F. S., Minson, J. A., Schöne, M., & Heinrichs, M. (2013). In the Eye of the Beholder Eye Contact Increases Resistance to Persuasion. Psychological Science, 0956797613491968.’
Photo Credit: garrryknight, Flickr Creative Commons
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