Eye Contact Is for the Room, Not the Camera
By Rita Okonkwo · Presence & Delivery
Most public speaking advice about eye contact was written for a room. Hold one person's gaze for a full thought, then move to someone else, working around the space so no section feels left out. It is sound advice for its medium. A live audience can tell when it is being looked at, and a speaker who takes in the whole room reads as including everyone, as long as the movement isn't mechanical.
The trouble starts when the same habit is carried onto a video call or a recorded talk, where it does close to the opposite of what it was meant to do.
What gaze does in a room
Chris Kleinke's 1986 review of the research on gaze and eye contact sorted the findings by what gaze does in an interaction: it provides information, regulates the flow of conversation, expresses intimacy, exercises social control and helps people get tasks done together.1 For a speaker, two of those matter most. Gaze tells listeners they are being addressed, and listeners read it as a sign of attention and, often, of sincerity.
The same review does not support the idea that more is always better. Gaze is read in context. Too little of it can come across as evasive or nervous. A fixed stare that never breaks can come across as pressure rather than warmth. The pattern that reads well in a room is contact that breaks and returns, which is how eye contact works in ordinary conversation anyway.
Looking away is part of thinking
Breaking contact is not only allowed, it is useful. In a 1998 study, Arthur Glenberg, Jennifer Schroeder and David Robertson looked at what people do with their eyes while answering questions, and found that averting the gaze disengages a person from their surroundings and makes remembering easier.2 Faces are demanding to look at. When you need to retrieve a figure, a name or the next step of an argument, glancing away frees up the effort that a face was taking.
So the speaker who looks to the side for a second while finding a word is not failing at eye contact. That glance is part of the same rhythm: look at someone while you deliver the point, look away while you think, come back for the next point.
On camera, the geometry changes
On a video call the room-scanning habit works against you for a reason that has nothing to do with confidence. The camera lens is the only eye a remote viewer has. Your instinct is to look at the faces on your screen, because that is where the people appear to be. But the camera usually sits above the screen, so looking at faces reads to the viewer as looking down and slightly away.
A review of eye contact in video-mediated communication by Bohannon and colleagues traces the problem to exactly this: the offset between the camera and the image of the other person's eyes, and the many attempts to engineer that offset away.3 Until the hardware solves it, the speaker has to. The habit that builds trust across a table can read as evasive on a call, purely because of where a piece of glass is mounted.
This is a mismatch of medium, not a flaw in the person. Someone who is attentive and warm in a room can look distracted on screen while being exactly as engaged.
Three behaviours sharing one name
It helps to stop thinking of eye contact as one skill. It is a signal that depends on the geometry of the setting, and three common settings ask for three different physical behaviours.
A meeting room or small group. Individual contact works as the classic advice describes. Give one person a whole thought, then move on. Include the people at the ends of the table, who are the easiest to forget.
A large hall. Past the first few rows you often cannot see individual faces, especially under stage lighting. Address sections of the room in turn and hold each for a complete sentence. From a distance, nobody can tell precisely whose eyes you are meeting, but people can tell whether their part of the room is being spoken to.
A webcam. The lens is the audience. Looking into it while you make a point is what a remote viewer experiences as being looked at.
Training for one of these and assuming it transfers to the others is a common and avoidable mistake.
What to do on a call
Look at the lens when you are making a point. Look at the faces when you are listening, because that is when you need to read them. Switching between the two is natural and matches the break-and-return rhythm of a real conversation.
Shrink the angle. Move the video window with the main speaker's face as close to the camera as your screen allows. The smaller the distance between the face you want to watch and the lens, the less your gaze drifts away from the viewer.
Don't stare at the lens without a break. The same rule applies as in a room. Glance away to think, glance at your notes, then come back. An unbroken stare into the camera looks as odd on a screen as it would across a table.
Watch a recording. You cannot judge your own gaze from the inside. Record two minutes of a call or a practice talk and watch where your eyes go. Most people are surprised by how much of the time they appear to be looking at their keyboard.
Plan for hybrid rooms. When some of the audience is in the room and some is remote, give the room its usual contact and turn to the camera for the points you most want the remote audience to feel addressed by.
Video adds its own strain beyond gaze, which is covered in what video calls do to a speaking voice. The old claim that a listener takes in mostly your face and tone is a misquote, traced in the 93 percent myth. And if the worry underneath all this is that people can see how nervous you are, the research on the illusion of transparency suggests they see much less of it than you think.
References
- Kleinke, C. L. (1986). Gaze and eye contact: a research review. Psychological Bulletin, 100(1), 78–100. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.100.1.78
- Glenberg, A. M., Schroeder, J. L., & Robertson, D. A. (1998). Averting the gaze disengages the environment and facilitates remembering. Memory & Cognition, 26(4), 651–658. https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03211385
- Bohannon, L. S., Herbert, A. M., Pelz, J. B., & Rantanen, E. M. (2013). Eye contact and video-mediated communication: A review. Displays, 34(2), 177–185. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.displa.2012.10.009