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Where do women and men look when communicating?
Last reviewed: 01.07.2025
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Men's attention is focused on the mouth of another person, and men can be distracted by any extraneous movement. Women, on the contrary, prefer to look into the eyes or at the figure, and are distracted only by another person who has entered the field of vision.
Women and men focus their attention on their interlocutor differently, as researchers from the University of Southern California (USA) have found. Psychologists and neurophysiologists have long been studying issues of human attention, including visual attention. But for some reason, gender, age, or ethnicity have been neglected in such studies.
The experiment involved 34 people. They were shown a staged video interview: a person on the screen answered questions, and a distraction - a pedestrian, a cyclist or a car - appeared behind him from time to time. At the same time, the researchers recorded the viewers watching these interviews; the scientists were interested in what men and women mainly focused their gaze on when concentrating, and what could distract them.
The psychologists presented the results of their observations in the journal Vision Research. It turns out that men literally look into the mouth of others: during an interview, they focused their gaze primarily on the speaker’s mouth. At the same time, they could be distracted by any strange movement they noticed in the background. Women, on the other hand, constantly shifted their gaze from the person’s eyes to his body and back, and were distracted only if someone else entered the frame.
The reasons for this difference - whether they are innate or "culturally acquired" - are not yet being discussed by scientists. Obviously, additional studies need to be conducted to take into account the ethnic, social and professional background of the participants. Practical conclusions are also premature, although it may turn out that women really do work better where they do not have to be constantly distracted by other people.