Gaze cues (repeatedly) fail to influence person evaluation.

Abstract

Eye gaze is an important social signal that people generally cannot help but follow, leading to joint attention. Joint attention has been shown to speed basic processing of objects, enhance memory for them, and even affect immediate value-based appraisal by increasing object likability. Here, across 8 experiments, we investigate for the first time whether jointly attending to other faces affects their longer-term social value (liking, trust) and attentional value (attention allocation and prioritisation). Emanating the basic gaze cuing paradigm, a central cue face looked towards or away from a ‘target’ face, which the participant had to respond to. Unbeknown to participants some target faces were always looked at (jointly attended – high value) and others were never looked at (‘ignored’ - low value). In studies 1 - 6 we investigated how these gaze-induced value conditions affected subsequent liking and trust social judgements of a person. Then, in studies 7 and 8 we additionally investigated whether effects of gaze on others may occur implicitly, effecting subsequent attentional engagement with others by using the target faces as gaze cues, or attentional targets in a dot probe task. Confirmed through mini meta-analysis, we found no significant effect of being jointly attended vs. ignored on either the social (N = 214) or attentional (N = 77) value of faces. We discuss whether faces are special and different to objects in this context.