Eye gaze is an important component of nonverbal communication, as it can convey information about attention, intentions, and attitudes. In a gaze-contingent eye tracking paradigm, we examined how different gaze interaction patterns of social agents impact social connectedness and trust. In two experiments, participants moved their eyes towards one of several female faces presented peripherally in each trial. The fixated face responded by either returning or averting their gaze. We varied response contingencies of the interaction partners, creating identities that either returned or averted their gaze more often. After interacting with each partner multiple times, participants estimated how often their gaze was returned by each interaction partner and rated how connected they felt to each of them. In Experiment 1, participants then identified letters depicted on the forehead of pairwise presented faces of the interaction partners in a free-choice task to determine whether they had general preferences for particular identities. In Experiment 2, they played one-shot trust games in the role of trustors with each interaction partner.
Participants were able to correctly discriminate the gaze return rate of all identities in both experiments. However, in both experiments, social connectedness ratings were not significantly related to the actual gaze return rates, but were higher when participants subjectively estimated that their gaze was returned more frequently. In the free-choice task, there was no significant preference for faces with higher gaze return rates, but participants entrusted significantly more money to those identities in the trust game.
The high discriminative ability of subtle differences in gaze return rates indicates a strong sensitivity to the gaze behavior of social interaction partners. The results further suggest that perceived gaze communication patterns might play a vital role in building trust and social connectedness in nonverbal interactions.