An eye-tracking and large-scale clickstream study showed that social factors — including monitoring your own attention — shift decisions as much as interface design does.
When people know someone can see where they look, they look differently — in person, and in digital interfaces. And where they look changes what they decide.
Any social or shared digital product — collaboration tools, streaming interfaces, social commerce — has users who are aware that their activity may be visible to, or inferred by, others. Does that awareness change behaviour? And does it interact with plain interface salience — the pull of what's visually prominent on screen? For product teams designing shared or presence-aware experiences, the answer shapes how much of user behaviour is "responding to the UI" versus "performing for an audience."
I used a two-study design that triangulates mechanism with scale. First, an eye-tracking experiment (N=17) with within-user manipulations of element salience and social-goal conditions — this reveals the moment-to-moment mechanism. Second, a large-scale clickstream/telemetry study (N=420), built in Python with the same within-user A/B structure — this tests whether the mechanism holds at scale. Eye-tracking tells you why; telemetry tells you how much and how often. I analyzed both with mixed-effects models and ANOVA in R.
Gerlofs, D. J., Roberts, K. H., Anderson, N. C., & Kingstone, A. (2022). Eye spy: Gaze communication and deception during hide-and-seek. Cognition, 227, 105209. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2022.105209
Two independent effects emerged. First, as expected, visually salient elements pulled attention and shifted decisions. Second — and more novel — users who were aware their gaze might be seen modulated their own behaviour: a social self-monitoring effect that operated on top of, and independently from, interface salience.
The findings inform how digital displays are designed to direct attention appropriately — especially in shared and collaborative interfaces where a user's activity is visible to others. Published in Cognition (2022), with open data and code on GitHub; the social self-monitoring strand is developed further in a companion paper on metacognition and the dual function of social gaze (JEP: General, in press).
Social awareness is an underappreciated force in product behaviour. Users of tools where activity is visible — collaborative platforms, social commerce, presence-aware apps — don't just respond to what they see; they respond to what they imagine others will see about them. Design that ignores this loop treats users as isolated actors when they aren't. Interfaces that account for social self-monitoring can guide attention more effectively, and design around the friction that visibility can create.