Surprise! Eye Tracking Shows Men Look at Women and Men
A post on the blog Think Eye Tracking discusses something they’ve learned about research results: people don’t always tell the truth. They set out to create a test showing how it can happen and, more importantly, how eye tracking can be used as a window into people’s subconscious thought processes.
Think Eye Tracking performed an experiment showing two images side by side, one depicting a male in a tight pair of swim trunks and the other a female in a bikini. Study participants donned an eye tracking device, and after showing the picture to thirty men and thirty women for five seconds apiece, they were left with results that proved their point. Eye tracking can reveal things that occur subconsciously that most people wouldn’t admit to.
Heat maps based on gaze frequency were employed which showed where each study participant had looked over the course of the five seconds. Among the women, the gaze was pretty spread out, with their eyes perusing the topless man’s chest, face, hair, shoulder, biceps, and, interestingly, the left hand. Women looked evenly over the image of the female in the bikini, checking out her face most often, neck, chest, breasts, stomach, and waist.
In what Think Eye Tracking calls surprising results, they found that men also checked out the image of the male in the Speedo, centering most often on his face, chest, and yes, groin, in addition checking out his stomach, arms, thigh, and also the left hand (though it looks like more eyes went towards the watch the male was wearing in the image.) For the image of the female, men looked closely at the face, chest/breasts, and stomach, near the belly button.
According to Think Eye Tracking, the heat maps show quite clearly that the men checked out the man’s “package” (61% of those tested), while the women seemed not to at all. They have a good point, however, that an implicit insight such as this might prove difficult to get from other research methods, for example by asking men where they looked because many men would not have admitted to sneaking a peek at another man.
Think Eye Tracking has deduced that women pay more attention to the left hand of the male, checking for a wedding ring, and that men are less interested in the marital status of the young lady, paying more attention to her face, breasts, and stomach. The women involved in the study looked at the female’s bikini but men seemed not to be interested in what she was wearing. Of course, this level of detail would be difficult to gain from verbal responses, but it’s important to remember that you can’t always know what the observer is thinking just from looking at a heat map.
Eye Tracking’s Implicit Approach Finds the Truth – Men Check Out Men
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- Eye Tracking: SEX! (Got Your Attention Yet?)
- Surprise: Eye Tracking Study Reveals Bigger Ads Are More Noticeable