# I prefer what you can see: The role of visual perspective-taking on the gaze-liking effect

## TL;DR

People tend to like objects that someone else is looking at, and this effect is driven by imagining the other person's visual perspective.

## Contribution

This study demonstrates that the gaze-liking effect is rooted in social perspective-taking rather than general attention cues.

## Key findings

- Participants liked objects more when those objects were visible to an avatar.
- The gaze-liking effect disappeared when the avatar was replaced with a non-social stimulus.
- The effect remained strong even when controlling for distance and stimulus type.

## Abstract

Individuals' gaze on an object usually leads others to prefer that object, which is called the gaze-liking effect. However, it is still unclear whether this effect is driven by social factors (i.e., visual perspective-taking) or the domain-general processing (i.e., attention cueing). This research explored the mechanism of the gaze-liking effect by manipulating the objects' visibility to an avatar in six online one-shot experiments. The results showed that participants' affective evaluation for the object was modulated by the avatar's visual perspective. Specifically, the visible object to the avatar received a higher rating of liking degree. However, when the avatar was replaced with a non-social stimulus, the experimental effect was absent. Furthermore, the gaze-liking effect was robust while controlling for confounding factors such as the distance between the object and the avatar or type of stimuli. These findings provided convincing evidence that the gaze-liking effect involves a process of the other's visual experience and is not merely a by-product of the gaze-cueing effect.