Case File 201 · Investigation Psychology

Is Avoiding Eye Contact a Sign of Lying?

By Murder Book Editorial TeamPublished by Gungrounds, the studio making Murder BookPublished 3 October 2026Updated 3 October 2026

No. Avoiding eye contact is not a reliable sign of lying. It is the most common belief about liars in the world, but the research does not support it. When people lie, the amount they look away does not reliably differ from when they tell the truth, and some studies find that liars deliberately hold more eye contact, not less. Plenty of honest people break eye contact because they are shy, thinking, anxious, neurodivergent, or simply following the norms of their culture. Gaze can tell you that someone is uncomfortable. It cannot tell you why, and it is not proof that a person is lying. Treat broken eye contact as a prompt to ask more, never as a verdict.

Key takeaways

Averting the eyes is the single most widespread stereotype about liars, found across dozens of countries, yet it has little support in controlled research.
A large meta-analysis found no reliable link between gaze and deception.
In one airport study, liars made more deliberate eye contact than truth tellers, while gaze aversion did not differ between the two groups.
Honest people look away for ordinary reasons: shyness, concentration, stress, cultural norms and individual differences.
Eye contact is a reason to ask a better question, not evidence of guilt.

Why do so many people believe liars avoid eye contact?

The belief is almost universal. The Global Deception Research Team, a group of researchers working across 75 countries and 43 languages, asked people a simple open-ended question: "How can you tell when people are lying?" The dominant answer, found in culture after culture, was that liars avert their gaze. No other belief was as widely shared.

That consistency is striking, but popularity is not evidence. The same body of research that catalogues the stereotype also shows it does not match how liars actually behave. One likely reason the myth persists is that it is taught early and rarely tested: we tell children to "look at me when you are talking to me," and we carry the association between eye contact and honesty into adulthood without checking it.

What does the research actually find?

When researchers measure gaze in controlled studies, the link to deception is weak or absent. The landmark 2003 meta-analysis by DePaulo and colleagues combined 1,338 estimates covering 158 possible behavioural cues to deception. Eye contact was among the cues examined, and it did not emerge as a dependable marker of lying. Many behaviours that people assume give liars away showed no reliable relationship with deception at all.

A 2019 review in the Annual Review of Psychology by Vrij, Hartwig and Granhag summarised the whole field bluntly: the nonverbal cues to deceit discovered so far are faint and unreliable, and people who watch behaviour are mediocre lie catchers. Gaze aversion is a textbook example of a cue that feels diagnostic but is not.

Do liars sometimes make more eye contact, not less?

Sometimes, yes. A 2012 study by Mann, Vrij and colleagues, published in the Journal of Nonverbal Behavior under the title "Windows to the Soul? Deliberate Eye Contact as a Cue to Deceit," tested this directly. The researchers worked with 338 passengers at an international airport who either told the truth or lied about their forthcoming trip.

The amount of gaze aversion did not differ between truth tellers and liars. What did differ was deliberate eye contact: liars used more of it. The authors suggested that liars take their credibility less for granted, so they may work harder to appear convincing, including by watching the interviewer closely to see whether they are being believed. In other words, a liar who knows the stereotype may stare you down precisely to seem honest. That is one reason gaze makes such a poor test: people can adjust it on purpose.

Why do honest people look away?

Breaking eye contact is an everyday behaviour with many innocent causes:

Thinking. People often glance away to concentrate, recall a detail or compose an answer. Looking aside can reduce the mental load of holding a gaze while you think.
Shyness and anxiety. Nervous or socially anxious people frequently avoid eye contact, whether or not they are telling the truth. The stress of being questioned is enough on its own.
Culture. Direct, sustained eye contact is read as respectful in some cultures and as rude or confrontational in others. A person following their own cultural norm can look evasive to someone with different expectations.
Individual differences. Autistic people and others may find eye contact uncomfortable or effortful. Reading their gaze as dishonesty is both wrong and unfair.

Because so many ordinary states produce the same behaviour, gaze cannot separate the liar from the shy, the tired or the frightened. This is the same trap discussed in Is Nervousness a Sign That Someone Is Lying?: an emotion you can see does not reveal its cause.

If not the eyes, then what?

The honest answer is that no single behaviour reliably reveals a lie. Decades of work converge on this point, which is explained further in Why There Is No Single Reliable Sign of Deception. People average only about 54% accuracy when they try to judge truth from lies by watching behaviour, barely better than a coin toss.

What tends to work better is content, not gaze. Approaches that focus on what someone says, how much of it can be checked, and whether it holds together against known facts outperform body-language hunches. That is why investigators compare accounts with independent evidence rather than scoring eye contact. For the broader picture of how well anyone can read a liar, see Can You Actually Tell When Someone Is Lying?, and for the related myths about posture and gesture, see Can Body Language Tell You If Someone Is Lying?.

How should you treat eye contact in practice?

Treat it as a question, not an answer. If someone looks away, the useful response is not "they are lying" but "what are they reacting to?" The behaviour might reflect the topic, the setting, the relationship or nothing at all. The only way to move forward is to gather information you can verify and to consider innocent explanations as seriously as guilty ones.

Popular belief	What research suggests
Liars avoid eye contact	The most common worldwide stereotype, with little support in controlled studies
Gaze reliably exposes a lie	A major meta-analysis found no dependable link between gaze and deception
Honest people hold steady eye contact	Honest people look away to think, out of shyness, stress or cultural habit
Watching the eyes improves detection	Average accuracy from behaviour is about 54%, close to chance

Does Murder Book treat eye contact as proof?

Murder Book: The Art of Interrogation is an upcoming narrative interrogation game from Gungrounds, an independent studio in Zagreb, Croatia. It is built around unreliable stories, behavioural changes and the gaps and contradictions in what suspects say, rather than around a single tell. That fits the research on this page: a glance away is a reason to look closer, not a confession.

In the game, the interesting moment is not that a suspect broke eye contact but why their account shifts when you press a detail. Cases are designed for focused 5–10-minute sessions, so the work is reading a story and testing it, not staring at a face waiting for a tell. Murder Book is in development for PC (Steam) and mobile, with release currently planned for the end of Q2 2027. If you enjoy the deception side of detective games, see Best Games About Catching Lies.