New eye-tracking study reveals how followers use gaze to show conscientiousness

An eye-tracking study found that more conscientious followers appear to use their gaze strategically when speaking, directing it at a leader’s eyes to support their own arguments. This behavior makes those individuals appear more conscientious to observers, indicating that they may be using eye contact to signal their reliability. The paper was published in the Journal of Applied Social Psychology.

Eye gaze is one of the most powerful forms of nonverbal communication because it helps people both gather information and convey information to others. Looking directly at another person can attract attention, increase engagement, and influence how social interactions unfold. Although avoiding eye contact is sometimes interpreted as a sign of dishonesty, gaze behavior is more complex and can communicate many different social meanings.

In workplaces, leaders use eye contact to signal confidence, involvement, and leadership ability. Followers can also use gaze to communicate qualities about themselves. One particularly important trait in organizational settings is conscientiousness, a personality trait that predisposes individuals to reliability, persistence, and effective task performance. Gaze may therefore act as a subtle behavioral signal through which followers convey attentiveness, engagement, and conscientiousness to leaders and colleagues.

Study author Simon Liegl and his colleagues hypothesized that more conscientious followers direct their gazes at their leader’s eyes more frequently. By doing so, they use gaze to signal their conscientiousness, leading others to perceive them as such. The researchers proposed that this gaze behavior mediates the association between how a person perceives their own conscientiousness and how observers perceive it.

The study included 39 university students (21 of whom were men) with an average age of 24. To participate, they were required to have normal or corrected-to-normal vision using soft contact lenses.

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During the study, participants completed a negotiation task while the researchers measured their eye movements using mobile eye-tracking glasses. The researchers used specialized software to map each recorded gaze point to a separate static image of the other people in the room on a frame-by-frame basis. This allowed them to map precisely where participants directed their gazes at any given moment.

In the negotiation task, participants interacted with three research assistants who acted as fellow participants. One assistant always acted as the leader, while the real participant and the other two assistants were placed in follower roles. Although the real participants were told that roles had been assigned randomly, the assistants followed carefully standardized behaviors so that differences in the interaction would mainly reflect the real participant’s choices. The followers had to argue for one preferred form of compensation, such as higher pay or more vacation, while opposing the alternatives preferred by the others.

The discussion took place over four rounds, with the leader making offers and each follower presenting arguments in turn. The mobile eye-tracking glasses allowed the researchers to measure where and how much the participants looked at the leader and the other followers during these interactions.

Participants also completed standardized questionnaires to assess their self-perceived charisma and personality traits, such as the Big Five. Additionally, the research assistants rated the participants’ charisma and personality based on their observations.

The results showed that participants who described themselves as more conscientious tended to look at their leader’s eyes more frequently, especially when speaking. Furthermore, participants who directed more eye gazes at the leader and other negotiators, both while listening and while speaking, tended to be rated as more conscientious by the observers. This indicates that other people interpret these frequent gazes as a signal of reliability and diligence.

Interestingly, participants’ openness to experience (a personality trait reflecting curiosity, imagination, preference for novelty, and receptiveness to new ideas) was associated with making less eye contact when speaking.

“Importantly, more conscientious followers appear to specifically instrumentalize their gaze when speaking and direct it at the leader to support their own arguments. Thus, this study underscores the importance of investigating followers’ signaling of their traits and abilities, identifies eye-directed gaze as a potential signal of conscientiousness, and further emphasizes the significance of gaze behavior as a particularly potent social cue in the organizational context,” the study authors concluded.

The research contributes to the scientific understanding of nonverbal behavior in social interactions. However, it should be noted that the study was conducted on a small group of students. The results of studies on larger or different demographic groups might vary.

The paper, “Eyes on the Leader: Gaze Behavior as a Cue for Follower Conscientiousness,” was authored by Simon Liegl, Thomas Maran, Marco Furtner, and Pierre Sachse.