What Gaze Tells Us About Personality

Gaze acts as a powerful nonverbal behavior that conveys emotional meaning and provides access to others' mental states. The present study sought to investigate how observing others' gaze behaviors can influence one's judgment of personality traits. Twenty four participants were placed face-to-face with a virtual human, alternately female or male, which they had to address verbally. Participants were made to believe that the virtual human was reproducing in real-time the gaze movements of true individuals whom they could not see. In fact, a computer program enabled the virtual human to react to the gaze of the participants that was detected via an eye-tracker. The virtual human displayed four different types of gaze behaviors: high amount of direct gaze, low amount of direct gaze, gaze avoidance and gaze following. After being exposed to each type of gaze behavior, participants were asked to rate the virtual human according to the five factor model of personality. The results showed that increasing eye-contact yielded higher judgments of conscientiousness. Gaze following was appraised as favoring extraversion compared to gaze avoidance. Additionally, personality judgments appeared to be modulated by the gender of the virtual human, with more negative traits attributed to the virtual female.