How to Tell if Someone Is (Really) Paying Attention to You

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Let’s face it, many of us feel undervalued, especially at work and sometimes in our relationships. One behavior that promotes that marginalized feeling is being ignored or, maybe even worse, when someone feigns attention, but their mind is adrift thinking about someone or something else besides you.

The consequences of inattention range from futility to fatality. Conversational inattention feels demeaning, but when attention lapses occur while driving or when operating machinery, the results can be lethal. One study found that inattention was contributory to 78 percent of auto crashes and 65 percent of near-crashes (Huisingh et al., 2019).

While death from inattention is unlikely for most, attentional bias also plagues organizations, researchers, and teachers. At work, lack of attention results in disengagement, which, according to Crabtree (2013), causes productivity lags, minimal employee commitment, and reduced company profits. Researchers, when designing surveys, must intentionally include trap questions to be certain that distracted participants don’t rank all answers the same, invalidating results (Malone & Musk, 2018).

Student distraction is the top learning obstacle reported by teachers and is related to inferior recall, lower achievement, and learner fatigue (Schmidt, 2020). In addition, distracted individuals procrastinate more and have reduced perceptions of their work quality based on the tendency to hastily submit sloppy work. In aggregate and across disciplines, inattention has a significant negative impact on performance and learning.

Signs of Distraction

Telltale signs of inattention include sporadic eye contact, people checking their phones or watches during a conversation, or the cursory “I’m sorry, can you say that again?” request when you ask a pointed question that wasn’t heard the first time. The root of inattention can be poor listening skills where words are heard but don’t have a material impact on the thought process of the listener. Good listeners empathize with the speaker by showing interest in the person’s message. While harder to detect, poor listening is often accompanied by frequent interruptions or what psychologists call “combative listening,” where the person is more interested in promoting their own point of view rather than understanding another’s perspective (Tyagi, 2013).

A recent study (Colombatto & Scholl, 2022) revealed that we transmit physiological cues when we aren’t paying attention. One of the most revealing signals is the size of a person’s pupils, which appear noticeably larger based on the listener's state of arousal. The researchers found that we are unable to control our pupil size when we have heightened interest or are excited about what we are seeing or hearing. Besides sending the attentional signals with our eyes, we also pay more attention to others when their eyes are dilated. This uncontrollable fixation response occurred even when the researchers used experimental manipulation to try to sway the participants from looking at the other persons’ eyes (using computer-generated facial moles of various sizes). The researchers concluded that pupil size was an involuntary response and a prominent social cue unrelated to attractiveness. The study take away—humans can easily detect and measure pupil size to see if someone is really engaged with what we have to say.

How to Show Someone You Are Paying Attention to Them

So, what can you do to promote pupil dilation and be sure that someone is paying attention to you? Start by realizing that focus depends on two separate neural processes (Schmidt, 2020). First, we need to direct our attention to the person with whom we are speaking (or the task we are attempting), and, second, we need to block out anything that is irrelevant to our intended goal (or unrelated to our conversation).

When listening, constantly maintain eye contact with the person with whom you are speaking. Simultaneously, listen so intently that you can mirror (repeat back to the person in similar words) the point they were trying to make to you. Besides reflecting content communicated by the other person, also be sure to reflect the feelings they are trying to communicate so you show that you are in touch with their emotions. Contextually, have your conversation in a place that naturally doesn’t offer easy distractions. Thus, avoid public areas and spaces where one can easily shift attention (such as living rooms with televisions or crowded coffee shops).

Finally, if all else fails, tell the other person, “I noticed that your pupils aren’t dilated” and you will surely get a very curious and focused response to your observation!