Mind Hacks

Hack #97. Look Where I’m Looking

We are innately programmed to follow other people’s eye gaze to see what they are looking at. It’s so deeply ingrained that even cartoon eyes can interfere with our mental processing of direction.

Eyes are special. They’re part of a two-way sense. Wherever I look, you can tell what I’m looking at. You can tell if I’m paying attention to you or not, as well as hazarding a good guess as to what I’m really thinking about. Following gaze isn’t a learned behavior. As far as the brain’s concerned, gaze direction is a first-class citizen of the real world, as important as location. In the case of location, the Simon Effect [[Hack #56]] demonstrates that we have a tendency to react to a prompt in the same direction as that stimulus. This hack shows that we interpret gaze direction in much the same way as location: a cartoon pair of eyes looking in one direction has the same effect.

In Action

A team at the University of Padua in Italy constructed an experiment to see the effect of gaze. ¹ They drew a pair of cartoon eyes—just two ovals with a colored oval (the iris) within each, as shown in Figure 10-5. The irises were colored either blue or green, and the cartoon could be looking either straight ahead or to one of the sides.

People taking part in the experiment had to report the color of the irises, hitting a button on the left for blue and on the right for green. The apparent gaze direction wasn’t important at all. Despite that, it was faster to hit the button ...