Is eye contact with strangers an East vs West thing? A study across 51 countries and territories says no

What the eye contact study asked

You catch someone's eye across a bar. You look away too fast. Then you spend the next ten minutes wondering what they made of that.

Culture is the handy explanation for that moment. East Asians are said to avoid eye contact, Westerners to hold it, and every travel guide has a line about it. A paper published in Scientific Reports on September 23, 2026 put the idea to a test.

The team surveyed members of online panels across 51 countries and territories, about 200 people per site. They started with 10,414 adults and excluded 27, leaving 10,387 aged 18 to 73, with an average age of 39.46. Half were women.

The questions were plain: "I feel comfortable maintaining direct eye contact with..." followed by a stranger, an acquaintance or someone close, of the same or the opposite sex. Six items, each scored from 1 to 7.

Eye contact with strangers is the hard one everywhere

Start with the least surprising result. The further away the relationship, the less comfortable people felt. Close others averaged 5.33, acquaintances 4.47 and strangers 4.05.

So if you look away when a stranger's eyes meet yours, you're in plenty of company. Strangers were the lowest category in the data.

Why the East vs West line won't hold

Now the comparison everyone wants. Please don't read this as a league table: each site has only about 200 people. These pairs are here to show how badly the line behaves.

Turkey (5.10) and the USA (5.04) sit near the top, and Japan (2.84) and South Korea (3.03) are low. Stop there and the old story survives. Add Indonesia and it wobbles. Add Chile, Bolivia (3.46) and Nicaragua (3.27) and it falls over.

The lowest levels of eye contact comfort were observed not only in several Asian cultures but also in South American nations, while the highest eye contact comfort was observed in many European cultures.

The authors conclude that eye contact comfort "cannot be reduced to simple regional dichotomies," and they say the result challenges Hall's classic split between contact and non-contact cultures.

The number I'd remember is a different one. Around 6% of the total variance in eye contact comfort was associated with study site (an intraclass correlation of 6.50%). That figure covers the whole scale, not only the stranger questions. In practice, knowing where someone is from tells you very little about how this particular person handles a glance. Most of the variation sits between people in the same place.

A few results that cut against intuition

Individual differences mattered too. Men, older people and people with higher socioeconomic status reported more comfort, as did people who endorsed gender equality, collectivism and conservatism.

Collectivism is the odd one. You might expect people in collectivist societies to hold eye contact less. Here it predicted more comfort at both the individual and the country level, and East Asian countries weren't the ones scoring highest on it.

The paper's review of earlier work is messy as well. In one experiment, Japanese and Finnish participants didn't differ significantly in their physical reaction to direct and averted gaze, yet the Japanese participants rated a direct-gazing face as angrier and less approachable. In another study, East Asian pairs held mutual gaze for longer than Western pairs.

The authors float "social safety" as a possible explanation and are clear that this part is speculation.

What this study can't tell us

• Taiwan and Finland aren't among the 51 sites. There's no Taiwan figure here, and Japan's or Hong Kong's score isn't a stand-in for it.
• The study is exploratory. It asks how comfortable people feel, not where their eyes actually go.
• "Maintaining" eye contact may mean different durations to different people, and in different languages.
• Country averages hide the differences inside a country.
• The respondents were panel members, so they don't stand in for everyone in their country.

That also means Thailand's 4.14 can't tell you how someone in a Bangkok bar will read your glance. It's an average of online self-ratings, not a report from that bar.

If you catch someone's eye this week

My rule from all this: don't read eye contact by passport. Someone looking away might be shy, distracted or just not used to it, and knowing where they grew up barely helps you guess which.

A look isn't an invitation either. Someone glancing at you doesn't mean they want to talk, and someone not glancing doesn't mean they don't. The clearest way to find out is to say something simple and notice how they respond.

If you struggle to look people in the eye, you don't have to fix that first. Plenty of people find strangers uncomfortable to look at. Start with whatever's around you and let the words do the work. If they don't pick it up, remember the person being approached is weighing different things.

Some researchers have tried changing the room instead. A Cornell team built a robot with mirrors to help strangers catch each other's eye. You can skip the robot and go somewhere people are already together.

If you'd like to meet people at the same bar or event, Limere is one way to do it. You're already in the same place. After that it's one sentence.