The first few seconds of a conversation are doing more work than most people give them credit for. Before a speaker even finishes an opening sentence, a listener has usually already made a rough call on whether this person seems trustworthy, competent, and worth continuing to listen to.
That call happens fast, and it happens quietly, without either person announcing that any judging is underway. Eye contact, or the lack of it, is one of the heaviest inputs feeding that snap judgment, which is exactly why so many speakers spend the rest of a conversation trying to undo an impression that locked in before they had a real chance to make their case.
This isn’t just a hunch about first impressions in general. Psychologist Alexander Todorov and his colleagues at Princeton ran a series of experiments asking people to judge unfamiliar faces after seeing them for a fraction of a second, then compared those snap ratings against judgments made with no time limit at all. As Todorov put it, “We decide very quickly whether a person possesses many of the traits we feel are important, such as likeability and competence, even though we have not exchanged a single word with them.” Giving people more time to look barely changed their minds. It mostly made them more confident in the read they had already settled on within that first fraction of a second.
That finding covers faces and snap judgments broadly, well beyond eye contact specifically. Eye contact sits inside that same process as one of the more controllable signals feeding into it, which is the useful part for anyone who actually wants to work on it. The rest of this piece is about what the research says eye contact is doing in that window, and what a person can practically do about it.
Eye contact specifically is carrying a lot of that judgment
Where things get more specific is a study run by Helene Kreysa, at Friedrich Schiller University in Jena, working with colleagues Luise Kessler and Stefan Schweinberger. They had volunteers watch short videos of a speaker making statements that were deliberately hard to verify one way or the other, things like claims about what sniffer dogs can and can’t smell, while the speaker either looked straight at the camera or looked away. The researchers reported that “participants were more likely to believe statements by a speaker looking at them directly, compared to a speaker with averted gaze.” A follow-up measure even showed people took longer to reject a claim when it had been delivered with direct gaze, as though the eye contact itself made disbelief a little harder to reach for.
That’s a fairly narrow, well-controlled result, and it’s worth being honest about what it does and doesn’t prove. It’s a single study, run on one speaker delivering one set of ambiguous statements, so it speaks to a tendency rather than a universal law. Still, the tendency lines up with something most people already sense in ordinary conversation: when someone won’t hold your gaze while telling you something, the claim itself starts to feel a little less solid, even though nothing about the actual content has changed.
Building steadier eye contact when it doesn’t come naturally
Fixing this doesn’t call for staring a listener down. The goal is closing the gap that avoided eye contact opens up, and that matters most for anyone who tends to look at the floor, a laptop, or their own hands while making a point. A few small, specific adjustments make this workable without turning an ordinary conversation into an interrogation.
Start with a settle-in beat, not a stare
The simplest fix for eyes that dart away out of habit is building in a short pause at the start of a sentence, long enough to land eye contact before speaking rather than reaching for it partway through. That one habit does most of the work, because listeners register the opening of an exchange more closely than the middle of it. Held for a beat and then let go naturally, it reads as composed instead of intense.
Aim for the space just below the eyes if direct contact feels too intense
For people who find sustained eye contact genuinely uncomfortable, whether from anxiety, unfamiliarity with the listener, or just personal wiring, a workable substitute is looking at the bridge of the nose or the space between the eyebrows. From more than a couple of feet away, almost nobody can tell the difference. It removes the physical discomfort that makes some speakers give up on eye contact altogether.
Break contact on purpose, not by accident
Looking away occasionally is normal, even useful, since unbroken eye contact for an entire exchange reads as strange rather than confident. The difference sits in when the break happens and how it ends. Glancing away while gathering a thought, then returning to the listener’s eyes once the sentence resumes, looks completely different from an eye line that simply drifts off and never comes back.
It doesn’t happen automatically on a video call
Eye contact gets harder to manage the moment a conversation moves onto a screen, mostly because the geometry works against the speaker by default. Looking at the other person’s face on a video call means looking at the middle of the screen, not the camera, which usually sits somewhere above or beside it. To the person on the other end, that reads as looking slightly off to the side, the same signal that in person would come across as evasive.
Look at the lens, not the picture
The direct fix is glancing at the camera itself during the parts of a sentence meant to land, the actual claim or ask, and letting the eyes drift back to the screen during the connective bits in between. Nobody manages to look at the lens for an entire call, and trying to would look strange anyway. Even a few seconds of camera contact at the right moment carries more than most speakers expect, since it’s usually the only real eye contact a viewer gets.
Give yourself permission for the mismatch
It helps to remember that a listener on a video call has adjusted their expectations for the format the same way a speaker has. A little imperfection in eye contact on a screen doesn’t register the way it would sitting across a table, so this is one spot where perfect execution matters a good deal less than most speakers assume. The judgment described earlier still runs in the background, just against a lower bar.
More eye contact is not automatically the fix
It would be easy to walk away from all this thinking the answer is simply to maximize eye contact in every situation, and that’s exactly where the research gets interesting. Frances Chen, a psychologist who studies persuasion, teamed up with Julia Minson, Maren Schöne, and Markus Heinrichs to look at what eye contact does during an actual disagreement, not just a first impression. They found something that cuts against the usual advice: “more eye contact between the listener and speaker during persuasive communication predicts less attitude change in the direction advocated.” Holding a hard, sustained gaze while trying to win someone over tends to make them hold their position more firmly, not loosen their grip on it.
The two findings aren’t actually in conflict once you separate what each one is measuring. Kreysa’s study was about whether a claim gets believed at all. Chen’s was about whether a listener who already disagrees gets talked out of that disagreement through more intense eye contact in the moment of persuasion. Read together, they point toward keeping eye contact steady and natural early in an exchange, particularly in the opening seconds where credibility gets sorted. Locking on hard the moment a disagreement shows up seems to backfire, which is the part most casual advice on this topic leaves out entirely.
Eye contact is clearly doing real work on how believable a speaker sounds, starting from the first few seconds and continuing through however long the conversation runs. It just isn’t a dial where more is always better, and treating it that way tends to backfire in exactly the moments where a speaker most wants to be persuasive. Getting it right looks less like intensity and more like consistency: present at the start, steady through the middle, and relaxed enough that a listener never has to wonder what the eyes are avoiding.
