For better social engagement, all you need to do is tilt your head

A tilt of the head leads people to look more at the eyes, making them more approachable and less threatening, a study suggests.


Every time we look at a face, we take in a flood of information effortlessly: age, gender, race, expression, the direction of our subject’s gaze, and even their mood.

Faces draw us in and help us navigate relationships and the world around us, according to the study published in the journal ‘Perception’.

“Looking at the eyes allows you to gather much more information. It’s a real advantage,” said Nicolas Davidenko, an assistant professor at the University of California.

By contrast, the inability to make eye contact has causal effects. “It impairs your facial processing abilities and puts you at a real social disadvantage,” Davidenko said.

People who are reluctant to make eye contact may also be misperceived as disinterested, distracted, or aloof.

Scientists have known for decades that when we look at a face, we tend to focus on the left side of the face we are viewing. Called the “left-gaze bias”, this phenomenon is thought to be rooted in the brain, the right hemisphere of which dominates the face-processing task.

Much less is known about the middle ground, how we take in faces that are rotated or slightly tilted. “We take in faces holistically, all at once — not feature by feature. But no one had studied where we look on rotated faces,” said Davidenko.

He used eye-tracking technology to get the answers. The left-gaze bias completely vanished and an “upper eye bias” emerged, even with a tilt as minor as 11degrees off centre.

“A slight tilt kills the leftgaze bias that has been known for so long,” said Davidenko.

For people with autism, Davidenko found the tilt leads people to look more at the eyes, perhaps because it makes them more approachable. “Across species, direct eye contact can be threatening. When the head is tilted, we look at the upper eye more than either or both eyes when the head is upright. This could be used therapeutically,” Davidenko said.