Objective Social cues such as eye gaze, head direction, and walking direction of biological motion are critical for human survival and social interaction. Since social and peripheral cues both have reflexive characteristics of attentional orientation, social attention is often regarded as one kind of exogenous attention. However, empirical evidence suggests that this explanation cannot fully account for all phenomena of social attention. Whether social attention and exogenous attention possess the same mechanism remains unclear.Methods Here, we used a typical spatial cueing paradigm to systematically examine the effects of cue validity on social attention and exogenous attention, triggered by eye gaze and peripheral cues, respectively.Results The results showed that both kinds of attention were affected by cue validity. With the increase of cue validity, the attention effects of eye gaze and peripheral cues increased. When the cue validity was noninformative (0.5) or strongly predictive (0.8), there was no significant difference in the attentional effects between social attention and exogenous attention. More importantly, however, when the cue validity was 0.2 (i.e., counterpredictive), the attentional effects of both cues were significantly different. While the facilitation effects of the eye gaze cue were weakened, the attentional effects of the peripheral cue were reversed and showed an inhibition pattern, suggesting that gaze-triggered attention is more strongly reflexive than exogenous attention orienting.Conclusion Our finding thus provides new evidence supporting the theoretical hypothesis that there exist significant differences between social attention and classical exogenous attention, at least in certain stages of their processing. Our study also offers a new method to distinguish social attention and exogenous attention through voluntary attentional control.