I once read an article about why cats seem to gravitate towards visitors who don't like cats.

Humans who don't want to interact with people avoid making eye contact. That's human body language.

But for cat body language, the opposite is true -- if you're being friendly, you don't look at the other cat. Looking at the other cat is aggressive.

The article was arguing that people tend to follow human convention and thus inadvertently become more-appealing to the cat, which gravitates towards the only human acting friendly in cat terms in the room.

kagis

Not the article I was thinking of. This one says that while there is some reason to believe that cats interpret being looked at by a human as an unfriendly sign, there's also reason to believe that in other contexts, they can interpret human body language as different from a cat's and find it to be appealing.

https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.613512/full

Cats detect human gaze with head movements and accordingly change their behavior (Koyasu and Nagasawa, 2019). When a familiar human (i.e., experimenter) and a cat spent time in the same room, the cat’s behavior was observed in response to the familiar human’s gaze. Cats looked at a familiar human for a shorter duration when the cats were directed gaze than when the cats were not, suggesting that, unlike dogs, they exhibit the behavior of avoiding a familiar gaze. Cats may see a human gaze as the same thing as a cat’s gaze, which indicates a threat in a social situation with no goal or threat (Bradshaw, 2016).

However, in a study with feeding situations, cats were fed by humans who gazed at them (Ito et al., 2016). As with Gácsi et al. (2004), two humans performed differently in front of cats. Cats selected more food from humans who called their names with gazing than food from humans who called their names without gazing. Whether or not cats avoid/select gaze may depend on the experimental situation. Cats also use human signals (Miklosi et al., 2005).

I also think that it's a bit odd that humans -- at least in today's world -- bare our teeth in a smile to be friendly, whereas in many species, that's a sign of aggression.

It's bc you try hard to ignore them, and they like that:-)