What to do
- Raise your chin about 15°. Anywhere from 10° to 20° works.
- Add a small smile with your lips closed.
- Look at their eyes for about 3 seconds at a time, then glance to the side. Do not look up or down.
Be in the look when your eyes meet theirs: people settle on a face within about a tenth of a second (Willis & Todorov 2006; Todorov, Pakrashi & Oosterhof 2009).
Practise it live
Open How I Land and choose “confident” after “Be seen as”. Your camera shows your face with this look drawn on it, and one instruction at a time tells you what to move. When it fits, hold it for five seconds to remember the position.
Free. Nothing is recorded, stored or sent.
Why it reads this way
- Confidence is read from the pride display: head raised, a small smile, eyes on the viewer. A raised head with a smile signals earned status; the same head without one reads as superior and contemptuous (Tracy & Robins 2007; Witkower et al. 2020; Mignault & Chaudhuri 2003).
- A chin 10° up already raised perceived dominance (Witkower & Tracy 2019), and a tilt of about 15° was recognised as pride better than 30° (Tracy & Robins 2004).
- A small smile was recognised as pride better than a large one (Tracy & Robins 2004), and broad smiles cut perceived dominance (Li et al. 2021).
- With the eyes looking up instead of at the viewer, far fewer people recognised pride (Tracy & Robins 2007).
- About 3 seconds of eye contact at a time is what viewers found most comfortable (Binetti et al. 2016), and a gaze that returns to the viewer raised likeability (Mason, Tatkow & Macrae 2005).
In the app, “Why” shows the target numbers and how each was built, with its sources.
Where the people you meet are from
- Japan and South Korea: eye contact about 2 seconds at a time, aimed softly between the eyes. Japanese raters judged a held, direct gaze in person as angrier and less approachable than Finnish raters did (Akechi et al. 2013), and Japanese adults in conversation look at the eye region and between the eyes (Haensel et al. 2020).
- Nothing else changes by region: the two axes the looks rest on, warmth and dominance, were found again in all 11 world regions tested (Jones et al. 2021).
Good for
Presentations, interviews, negotiations, walking into a room.
Guides
How to look confident when you present, Chin up or chin down? What your head angle says, Your face in a job interview. All guides.
Other looks
Approachable, happy, open, competent, trustworthy, calm, alert, mysterious, intimidating. All ten on one page.