Short and Sweet Contact Is in the Eye of the Beholder: The Eye Contact Illusion Shane L. Rogers , Oliver Guidetti, Craig P. Speelman and Melissa Longmuir Psychology Department, Edith Cowan University, Perth, Australia Ruben Phillips Medical and Health Sciences, Edith Cowan University, Perth, Australia Abstract In a simple experiment, we demonstrate that you don’t need to mindfully look at the eyes of your audience to be perceived as making eye contact during face-to-face conversation. Simply gazing somewhere around the face/head area will suffice. Or to borrow a term from Mareschal and colleagues, direct gaze will suffice. For those readers who experience anxiety when gazing specif- ically at another person’s eyes, or when being gazed at, we expect this is welcome news. Keywords eye contact, illusion, eye tracking, conversation Date Received: 1 April 2018; accepted: 9 January 2019 Maintaining strong eye contact is widely accepted to be an important communication skill in Western cultures (Bonaccio, O’Reilly, O’Sullivan, & Chiocchio, 2016; Hargie, 2010). After all, as the saying goes the eyes are the windows to the soul. If you aren’t willing to engage in soul-to-soul mutual eye contact, then you are at best lacking in confidence, and at worst, untrustworthy. The reverence devoted to eye contact is however not supported by the scientific evidence. It has been consistently shown that people have difficulty distinguishing precisely where a partner is looking when being looked at somewhere on the face, or just off the face. A bias exists to perceive ‘eye contact’ when it is not technically happening (Gamer Corresponding author: Shane L. Rogers, Psychology Department, Edith Cowan University, Perth, Australia. Email: shane.rogers@ecu.edu.au Perception 0(0) 1–5 ! The Author(s) 2019 Article reuse guidelines: sagepub.com/journals-permissions DOI: 10.1177/0301006619827486 journals.sagepub.com/home/pec