Visual Perspective Liking Effect

As an important social attention clue, gaze plays an irreplaceable role on various social cognitive situations. One interesting phenomenon is that the gaze of other person on a certain object increases individuals’ preference on this object. This phenomenon is called gaze liking effect. However, it is still controversial that this effect depends on either social attributes or the domain-general attention-oriented role of the gaze. Through an innovative experimental paradigm and sufficient variable control, our study strongly supports that the gaze liking effect is mainly caused by social attributes of the gaze. More importantly, we find that the dominant reason of this liking effect is visual perspective taking, rather than the gaze itself. Only when an individual takes the visual perspective of others’ gaze and an object is visible under this visual perspective, will the object obtain more preference from the individual. If there is no visual perspective taking, then even if the gaze points to an object, the liking effect will not occur. The results of our study effectively explain why previous studies on gaze liking effect do not reach a unified conclusion. And our study provides a new perspective for the research in this field.