Eyes wide shut: implied social presence, eye tracking and attention

People often behave differently when they know they are being watched. Here, we report the first investigation of whether such social presence effects also influence looking behavior—a popular measure of attention allocation. We demonstrate that wearing an eye tracker, an implied social presence, leads individuals to avoid looking at particular stimuli. These results demonstrate that an implied social presence, here an eye tracker, can alter looking behavior. These data provide a new manipulation of social attention, as well as presenting a methodological challenge to researchers using eye tracking.