I can focus better on what someone is saying if I'm not looking at them. Sometimes it's detrimental because others think I'm not paying attention. If I do look at a person's face while speaking with them, it is most beneficial to me to look at their mouth and read their lips while I listen. But then I'm like aware that I'm staring at this person's mouth so then I'll fake eye contact by looking them in the eyes but blurring my vision slightly. I'm not sure if that looks weird, but I think people don't notice. Nobody has ever said anything about my eyes looking odd. Or maybe they just think that's how they are.
This isn't effective because a lot of people talk with their facial expressions as much as their voice. I focusing requires this much effort for you you should consider getting help. This approach may work for you but would be very alienating for many people you encounter, even if they are too polite to say so.
I also tend to stare at the mouth of the person I’m talking to!
Which, I think, makes it look like I’m looking at their chest because the women I talk to almost invariably adjust their shirt in a way that suggests they’ve become uncomfortable (because they think I’m looking at their chest)
I always thought it depended on how closely seated you are to the other person? The closer we are (e.g. seated next to each other over dinner), the higher the chances of the aforementioned reaction.
That actually helps if you're hard of hearing, or if the person has an accent that you have trouble with. The visual data from what their mouth is doing helps you interpret the audio data. (You don't have to know lipreading for this to work, BTW - though true lip reading would help more...)
Same here. I assume a thinking pose and look at a corner in the room - that should signal that at least my attention hasn't strayed elsewhere more significant.
My another strategy is to make occasional eye contact while blurring my vision. To them, I'm making eye contact, whereas for me, it's not that different when I'm looking at the corner.
Yeah I’m really good at those hidden 3d pictures. I can split the focus of my eyes super quickly and will do that sometimes while looking at someone if I feel like I’ve not looked at their eyes for too long. On zoom if I’m really listening I’m literally turning my head to the side and possibly closing my eyes.
If you think people can't tell the difference you're gravely mistaken. I also have issues with this sort of thing, but it just requires additional work on my part. Assuming your conversation partner can't read is almost invariably a mistake.
For me it falls as a "dont care" if we use a Karnaugh map/truth table; i'd more likely believe that "looking somebody in the eyes" for conversation has evolved from some trust issues similar to hand-shaking to show a form of trust.
I've had many-a-day playing some relaxing/intense video games, all the while having very in-depth conversations with both people online (no eye contact there) as well as with people in the same room who were also playing video games.
People that think you are not paying attention just need to both learn and understand that not everybody is the same in how brain functions work; we are also taught to take notes in lectures as well, and as far as I recall, there was no staring the lecturer in the eyes while I was writing shit down... (and then mulling over data and questioning as needed)
I agree a lot. You make eye contact to catch nuances in meaning of a socially laden topic, or when you want to gauge the other persons reaction to what you're saying etc. Different topics just require different levels of eye contact.
There are some people though, who are clearly very socially apt who almost stare at you while they keep talking, which actually seems weird to me. Firstly, what are they looking at? It seems kind of shameless to say it crassly. Secondly, they don't gesticulate with their eyes, which makes them harder to read.
The entire idea that someone has a problem with "holding eye contact" is misguided in my opinion. It doesn't explain what you could do to fix it, and focusing on where you are looking is most certainly going to make it worse because your visual attention is a low-level function that is supposed to work unconsciously. What one might have a problem with is not caring about the person you're talking to, or whether you catch some vague implication, or that they understand exactly where you're coming from. And if that's the problem, it's at least possible to work out some kind of solution for oneself.
Same here. I feel like I'm hyper-focusing on their facial features and expressions instead of their words. When I'm looking away I can devote my full attention to their words (and tone).
I've overcome this to a degree with a lot of practise, but it's not my comfort zone.
It depends on the person. I can’t look at someone directly who I find attractive, otherwise I just get over it and try to lock eyes because I want to treat ppl how I want to be treated, can’t have it both ways.. no one’s perfect though.
What helps for this is to not look at their eyes, instead just look at the bridge of their nose between their eyes. For them it'll be as if you are looking straight into either eye.
Yeah coming from a culture where you were taught not to make eye contact and then going to a country where it’s rude to not look someone in the eye was very jarring.
I still have to basically look at someone’s temple to get by, even a decade later. The discomfort of making eye contact is just so ingrained now.
Yeah this is a common issue for people who move across cultures.
I had a boss who said he only hires a certain ethnic group because they always take on more work and never say no.
He had 2 of these people end up in hospital and a formal accusation of bullying against him... my conclusion was, he'd narrowed on a culture that is averse to social challenge / conflict. Where saying "no" would be socially unacceptable.
But he wasn't aware of the flip-side... that the manager is then responsible for judging the situation and not making direct requests that are impossible to refuse.
Yeah unfortunately I see that a ton as an Indian myself , where we’ve been taught to be submissive.
Many of my other Indian coworkers are always too scared to push back in any form, and many of my Indian friends back in India would work till the early hours of the morning regularly.
I’m lucky in the sense that I know to push back often when something doesn’t feel right or is illogical to me. Ironically I was often chided in high school for that as teachers would suggest that this would be bad for my career. It’s actually been the best thing for it, letting me become system architects at multiple large companies. But I see where they were coming from, in that the same attitude would have burned me if I’d stayed.
> I had a boss who said he only hires a certain ethnic group because they always take on more work and never say no.
> But he wasn't aware of the flip-side... that the manager is then responsible for judging the situation and not making direct requests that are impossible to refuse.
He was fully aware of the "flip-side." He explicitly admitted he's hiring people solely with a cultural predisposition towards "never saying no." He can ask anything of them knowing it's impossible for them to refuse, even if it kills them.
> But he wasn't aware of the flip-side... that the manager is then responsible for judging the situation and not making direct requests that are impossible to refuse.
You assume he cares. Assuming the person across from you gives a crap about you is a regularly fatal one.
Humans are not basically good. They are basically greedy.
Most humans are both good (empathy is a strong thing) and greedy (wanting what's best for yourself and those are you close to is also a strong incentive). Balancing those two, sometimes opposing, desires is part of being human.
It's worth noting that they're not always opposing. Sometimes empathy makes us feel better when others feel good, and the negative impact on ourselves can be more than countered by the good feeling from making others happier.
Most humans are basically good. A significant minority aren't, maybe about 10%. Enough that you should never ignore the possibility the other person is a psycho, but few enough that you should never assume everybody else is a psycho.
Also, psychos tend to concentrate in certain places. If you're in a board room, or hanging out with a bunch of surgeons, perhaps it's rational to assume everybody else there is a psycho.
It's interesting that millions of people will probably read stuff about "eye contact = trust/attention", when in fact this is a complex topic.
Reminds me of the pseudoscience on how "touching your face or nose is a sign of deceit". Turns out almost everyone is no better than chance at spotting deceit. But judges, cops, school teachers etc... have all been relying on this kind rule to change the course of other people's lives.
Thanks for posting this, I was brought up the same way. It's very uncomfortable for me to have eye contact in a conversation, I usually just do it when greeting people.
>Mean engagement was quantified as an average of the two continuous self-reported engagement ratings that each conversation partner made while rewatching a video of their conversation
The tail is wagging the dog in this study. The study fundamentally fails to validly measure what it claims to measure. It's measuring the perception of attention, not attention itself.
I only look at their face to signal that I'm paying attention to them, but if I'm looking at their face, I'm probably paying attention to looking at their face not at what they're actually saying. It's a very conscious move on my part to sacrifice my actual ability to pay attention to give off the perception of paying attention. If I want to both pay attention and look like I'm paying attention, I write notes.
>186 subjects comprising 93 dyads (mean age: 19.38 y; 120 females) participated. Subjects were recruited from Dartmouth College
Also a rather WEIRD sample which is actually a major issue in a study like this since it's measuring something rooted in cultural perceptions.
> In 2008, Arnett pointed out that most articles in American Psychological Association journals were about U.S. populations when U.S. citizens are only 5% of the world's population. He complained that psychologists had no basis for assuming psychological processes to be universal and generalizing research findings to the rest of the global population.[279] In 2010, Henrich, Heine, and Norenzayan reported a bias in conducting psychology studies with participants from "WEIRD" ("Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic") societies.[280][281] Henrich et al. found that "96% of psychological samples come from countries with only 12% of the world’s population" (p. 63). The article gave examples of results that differ significantly between people from WEIRD and tribal cultures, including the Müller-Lyer illusion. Arnett (2008), Altmaier and Hall (2008) and Morgan-Consoli et al. (2018) view the Western bias in research and theory as a serious problem considering psychologists are increasingly applying psychological principles developed in WEIRD regions in their research, clinical work, and consultation with populations around the world.[279][282][283] In 2018, Rad, Martingano, and Ginges showed that nearly a decade after Henrich et al.'s paper, over 80% of the samples used in studies published in the journal Psychological Science employed WEIRD samples. Moreover, their analysis showed that several studies did not fully disclose the origin of their samples; the authors offered a set of recommendations to editors and reviewers to reduce WEIRD bias.[284]
This is a huge problem for many psychology studies more broadly. Undergrads are a ready and plentiful source of test subjects for research professors, but they come with a huge bag of self-selected characteristics that may not extrapolate to the broader population at all.
The abstract oversells it, as usual. The effects are small, and the modelling is loose. Other studies have shown that gestures can play a role in turn taking, and that we are capable of predicting when the speaker is going to finish simply by listening. Eye contact may be just one more factor weighing in.
Is there a book out there on coaching people who are bad at 'finishing'?
I have sympathy for people who have been institutionally censored and I feel properly guilty when we are interrupting them. But some people just go on and on, and/or telegraph false finishes, then try to invoke the same kind of courtesy when they are cut off.
I love the direction, drilling down into conversation mechanics. Very cool that technology is enabling this kind of deep dive. It's a very conservative article tho, not making any big points.
I'd like to see a stab at a theory that explains how conversation actually works. Intuitively, it feels like a hack built on top of systems designed for acting in the world.
I think social position is written on the face. The labiofacial folds measure exclusion (deep lines indicate social isolation/discomfort, no crease indicates strong social ties). Feels tied in with nervous laughter as well.
Seriously, though. As I get older, I am starting to think there might actually be a strong correlation between how people look and act. What I don't know for sure is which is first. Some is obviously nature bur nurture is obviously a thing, too.
The brain is a physical structure. So is it inconceivable that some genes may code for phenotypes in both the brain and external appearance, or have some indirect purely biological relationship? I’m not suggesting that this would account for a significant portion of the correlation between external appearance and behavior (if any at all), but maybe it’s enough to be picked up subconsciously.
Domestication syndrome seems to suggest a link. [1]
If one assumes behavior is largely driven by physical/chemical/electrical processes within our bodies then this would not be surprising. Those processes are going to affect our appearances and being able to roughly assess those processes in somebody else from a distance would be a top tier skill that evolution would certainly end up selecting for.
A largely related example of this is smell [1]. I'm not referencing that particular study so much as the million other studies it also references and mentions early on. Our conscious appreciation of smell doesn't really reach much greater depth than "eww" or "aww", but there's a dramatically larger amount of subconscious processing that we do to come to that conclusion. For one fun example, men subconsciously rate the perceived attractiveness of a woman, based on a blind shirt sniff test, significantly higher when she is ovulating. Again, it's evolution baby. [2]
As a random thought, this also goes some way to explaining the uncanny valley. When the pieces don't fit together into a coherent whole, the brain simply rejects the lot of it.
> I am starting to think there might actually be a strong correlation between how people look and act.
I think the way people act influences the way their appearance is perceived in very subtle ways. A sketchy liar could have exactly the same bone structure as an honest man, but the sketchy liar will be perceived as less honest due to almost imperceptible differences in body language, the way they hold their facial muscles, etc. The result of these subtle differences can be detected with a vague sensation of "this guy is sketchy, he's probably about to lie to me."
Also I think there is an element of truth to the old wive's tail of "your face is going to get stuck like that". People who frequently have malicious facial expressions in private will find themselves having malicious facial expressions when they don't mean to, when interacting with the people they intend to deceive. Maybe out of pure habit, or maybe because those muscles are just getting more exercise. Somebody who often has a lopsided smirk will develop muscles on one side of their face more than the other, and eventually they can't help but to smirk by default.
I know I’m in the minority here but I’ve never experienced this. Eye contact for me is a deeply uncomfortable thing and I’ve struggled with it my whole life. I do make eye contact with people but I almost never sustain it for more than a couple seconds. I find online meetings to be pretty engaging most of the time. No less engaging than a meeting in an office with the same amount of participation.
The two most populated countries in the world for example don’t encourage eye contact, and when you account for the large number of countries in Asia that similarly don’t, the statistical norm is to avoid eye contact.
Yeah in hindsight I’m probably not. Probably my own bias of 1) hearing from people that online communication just isn’t the same 2) my own struggle with eye contact 3) being American.
In martial arts when I was younger, we spent at least a few sessions just staring at each other, to get comfortable / less awkward with looking at your opponent.
That, along with taking punches to the stomach (We weren't very strong yet, so no worries about us actually injuring each other), just to get "used to getting hit", among other things... these kinds of training helps remove the mental blocks when you actually start to spar.
I'd say that eye-contact is just one of those things you need to train for. I know I did, it helped me a lot inside of a sparring match to help me focus on the opponent rather than feeling awkward (they're looking at me kinda thing).
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If you haven't had martial arts practice, then you could just practice eye-contact with your friends instead.
> In martial arts when I was younger, we spent at least a few sessions just staring at each other
This seems… not right.
I’m guessing your martial arts teacher was not traditionally trained, but I could be wrong.
In pretty much every sport that I have played in which I engage in some way with my opponents, it’s pretty much always best to focus on the hips, since all major/significant motion starts there.
A lot of martial arts is an "after school club" activity. It could very well be not martial arts related at all but more general social training the instructors wanted from us that time around.
I dunno. Its where I learned to look people in the eyes, honest.
I took karate and was instructed to look at the eyes. I'd stare into the eyes while sparring.
Didn't work well because I'd feel somewhat hypnotized by the eye contact and could never react in time to block strikes.
The blocking method was ridiculous as well but that's a separate point. Looking back I think a high percentage of that karate training was counter productive or just useless.
It is useful for fighting. Allows you to see what your opponent is going to do early. If you look at their hands instead e.g. you’ll see their movement well after it’s already started, and you won’t be able to react in time. That of course assumes your opponent is well trained. Amateurs’ moves are so inefficient you might as well look at the ground and you’ll still probably be able to defend yourself.
> it’s pretty much always best to focus on the hips, since all major/significant motion starts there.
Not a martial artist, but I'm sure it starts with the intention. Whether that intention can be intuited from the glance I don't know, but wouldn't surprise me.
You’ll end up biting on feints - or worse, get hit - if you look at their eyes. A good fighter might look at your legs and begin moving as if to throw a leg kick, but throw a hook to the head instead. If you read their advertised intent and try to check the leg kick, you get knocked out by the hook.
In MMA fights / sparring, I’ve found touch is the biggest thing to understand intent. A hand on the shoulder can feel where the opponent is moving. Like a race car driver who feels the slide through their butt and corrects the slide before their eyes are telling them they’re sliding.
When training in jiu jitsu, once I make contact with my opponent I tend to close my eyes most of the time. Once you see something it's usually too late, so you need to learn to feel your opponents body, their muscles tensing, their breathing, etc...
> I'd say that eye-contact is just one of those things you need to train for.
But for why and what if I'm not into martial arts? Just for social norms and studies that say only then I am really engaged and pay attention, which is definitely not true for me?
People wear sunglasses for lots of reasons, many of which are none of your business. They might be vision-impaired, have glaucoma, have dilated pupils from the eye doctor, or just be really hungover.
You’re not in charge, leave people’s clothing and accessory choices alone.
Yep, im one of these too and find online meetings more relaxing too. When I make (forced) eye contact I lose my train of thought and often have to glance at the ceiling or out in the distance when I’m in a deep conversation. But I adapted and I am comfortable not making eye contact when I deliver a speech. I may as well be on the spectrum somewhere as I’ve always been this way. The coping mechanisms I’ve built still don’t help not disturb my train of thought when making eye contact, I have no problem with the eye contact itself but it’s just too distracting sometimes.
I have never been comfortable with direct eye contact but the funny thing is that I am often complemented on my eyes, which feels kind of weird but also makes me realize how other people can judge you in ways you wouldn't normally consider.
As I mentioned there, personally, once I switched to WFH once the pandemic started, this was a total non-issue for me. I even switched teams and had all brand new coworkers. They never saw me and I never saw them. Everyone's totally fine with it.
I mean, for many of us, we've often had to have meetings/calls with people in another geo anyway. People talk on the phone all the time and I've yet to hear someone say they didn't feel engaged talking to someone on the phone because they couldn't make eye contact. People fall in love that way all the time.
The moment I make real eye contact I hope for the conversation to end quickly, because I can't disconnect the eye contact. I try to offset my gaze a bit, but for some reason my mind will try to make eye contact again, it's hard to concentrate and keep my eyes from making contact again. And when I make eye contact, it's like I see straight inside the person. Now that I think of it, this differs from person to person, it feels more weird when the other person is not someone close to me.
I'm curious how you feel when listening compared to talking.
I mean, is it more comfortable to concentrate with eye contact when you're listening to the other person? In other words when not trying to concentrate on forming a response to a question.
I appreciate this won't work in every situation. But I personally find it easier to make eye contact when I'm listening to a friend tell me about their weekend or something.
I think for me there's 2 levels of eye contact. When you look at the eyes, and then when your pupils look straight into the other pupils. When I look straight into the pupils, it's like I put a fix on them and I get some sort of tunnel vision. Now that I think of it maybe my brain thinks of the reverse, that I'm somehow put on the spot by the other person, and I become anxious. Doesn't happen all the time, but when it happens, it becomes weird.
I wonder how much this is affected by culture ("a lot" would be interesting and "not at all" would be very interesting). It feels like it's a low-level innate communication thing (e.g. dogs do this too when communicating with humans, while inter-dog eye contact has different semantics).
I do notice that I look at the speaker in a zoom call, even when I have my own video off. I also notice in big calls where many people have their cameras off, it's common that a questioner or commenter will enable the camera before speaking, and then disable it again when their turn is over.
(I searched for "culture" and "language" before posting)
It is for that reason why online meeting tools like Zoom, MS Teams, etc., should provide an option to hide your own video from yourself – I believe one’s own video is a massive source of distraction from concentrating on other persons in a conversation.
From time to time I observe where other meeting participants look at and I feel like this is very, very common (you can tell by the specific corner a person is looking at in some of these applications)
In the apps that allow it I just move myself under the camera on my laptop so it looks like I'm just looking into the camera. Or I hope that's what people think!
I am terrible at eye contact. First of all my eyeball FOV is set to like 60 and I wear glasses so when people are too close it’s hard for me to make eye contact because I just see their whole face lol. Also when I talk to some people who make strong eye contact I feel like they’re looking into my soul and it’s uncomfortable.
I know it’s a me problem, just my experience tho lol.
Get used to eye contact cuz if/when you lose hearing you’ll be lip reading and trying to pick up cues re when to speak and what was said. Unless you have two hearing aids for stereo, where people look in a group is an excellent cue who is talking. And talking over people is an “I’m an asshole” cue that one should try to avoid.
(I wear hearing aids and always have; not correcting you; just typing/sharing y own observations to see if I learn anything)
I do plenty of staring at mouths (subconciously), and eye contact has always been a different thing than eyes-watching-lips, especially one-on-one. I'm not sure how it is for the normal-hearing, but prolonged eye contact has never been something I've done much of, my eyes usually regularly drop to the lips (or for those who I can hear really well, I won't be looking at their faces at all ;) )
When following in a group setting, I do watch eyes, but have that strong response of looking away if the speaker happens to make eye contact. And yeah, participating/interjecting in conversations is a weakness.
The whole masking thing though... has been new and rough. If I have to converse 1-on-1 with the other wearing masks, there's no lips to watch, but the eyes are still there! I haven't dug into it too much (spooky? eyes are just distracting non-lipreading motions?), but my brain does massively better at figuring out what is said if I look to the side (typically at the floor/wall). Whether or not I have any autism spectrum traits or not, I'm sure a higher percent of people wonder about such now, than they did a few years ago.
Masks + group of friends: I pretty much auto give up and idle on my phone; the culture of "don't question others about wearing masks" is too strong to feel socially comfortable with asking for masks to be removed. That's definitely excuse-making on my part, but my friends also are pretty good about removing masks when we're seated for dinner, etc. so I haven't been forced to ask for mask removal anyways...
What country is this? You just made me realise I haven't seen anyone wear a mask in person for ... months I think. I'm in the UK and covid has just become accepted as being here to stay. If anyone wears a mask here they are the odd one out, and I think people will assume they must be extremely vulnerable in some way since there is no societal or government pressure to do so, and catching it is kinda just a matter of time now.
I wear them also with severe loss. The eyes comment came from meetings before I got them. Many people “grow” into needing aids and go through a struggling period where many voices are just gone. Masks suck for deaf folks, but I can get a little from eye crinkles. And saying what a lot. And avoiding crowded, noisy restaurants as I’m screwed with or without aids.
There's another thread below that mentions a bunch of the same things you and I just did. Good knowledge and confirmation!
And agreed, masks have shown (what has been said plenty in the past), there's still a ton of readable emotion just around the eyes. Distracting, though!
Relating to the growing into needing/wearing them: I've worn mine since age 3 (and gone from analog to digital, with some tradeoffs of each), they're a constant, but I also have suspicions of my listening comprehension getting worse-over-time. But it could also just as well be increasing self-reflection/awareness + new experiences. (Just this month, mid 30s, first time visiting Germany, after 6ish years of German classes in middle/high school + college; confronted some real hearing limitations trying to listen to natives!)
Maybe I’m a weirdo but I tend to look at peoples mouths more than their eyes. I’m not hard of hearing, but I feel like it helps me follow conversations better.
I actually found out I rely on lip reading during the pandemic when everyone was wearing masks and I couldn't understand about 2/3 people I was engaging with.
When most people are asked to consider the accessibility problems that masking causes, they often don't realize that it extends beyond just the person wearing the mask.
Like you just described, somebody else wearing a mask can impose a significant accessibility burden, even for people who may not necessarily have hearing difficulties, for example.
Encouraging, or even forcing in many places, people to wear masks was truly an accessibility tragedy. It's made even worse by the fact that widespread everyday masking isn't even effective. A lot of people were forced to endure a lot of unnecessary and unjustifiable suffering.
I have a similar problem, but I don't think lack of lip reading is the problem for me. I think a lot of people simply mumble when they have a mask on. Something about the sensation of the mask on their face has them start slurring words and speaking softly.
For a large segment of the population, the act of covering the mouth (regardless of whether it's with a mask, a hand, or something else) activates a deep-seated submission reflex.
Different individuals submit to varying degrees, and in different ways.
Some people become very quiet and withdrawn, which can lead to the problems you describe when they try to communicate verbally while masked.
Others feel intense paranoia, and desperately seek out authority figures to latch onto.
Yet others realize that they're submitting, and it makes them feel weak and powerless. These are the individuals who often react aggressively when encountering somebody who isn't submitting like they are.
Sure there's an element of that, but for some people it seems much worse than others. Some people can still speak clearly with a mask on, but many people can't.
It can be particularly bad when there is a plastic barrier of some sort in front of the masked speaker.
Even today, this is still pretty common at cashiers and checkouts in Canada, for example.
Many of these barriers were put up rapidly without much thought, and are completely improvised. They aren't like the purpose-build security shields that still have holes, vents, or microphones/speakers to allow at least some verbal communication to take place.
The thick, rigid plastic barriers are the worst offenders, by far, although even flexible plastic sheets can definitely disrupt communication, too.
As we age, maybe prior experience coalescing as 'wisdom' begins to play a more active role in our day to day decision making? That wisdom manifesting in more of a consciously aware way...
Whereas maybe we once used to (passively or actively) make important judgement calls about a persons broader character based on certain physical attributes such as the uniqueness of their face, our wisdom says it just doesn't matter in quite the way we maybe once thought. One of the biggest lessons I learned early on when starting in the tech industry is absolutely never assume anything about anyone based on appearance. We've all fallen for that before!
This is industry dependent because for example, if we're talking about the fashion industry then things are different. I digress...
Regarding the body language and signaling by extension of appearance in American culture it can be used as an measure of certain aspects of someone's personality - not necessarily bad in the lack-of-eye-contact scenario, but we know it's a lot harder for someone to maintain the impression of engagement throughout inattentive interactions. Eye to eye is engaging, anything else is less.
However, since it's about establishing trust and respect when it comes to a new business relationship, at least in America, there's a sense of 'can I trust this person', that's rooted in fear. So if we're talking about something important presumably with potentially painful financial or reputational ramifications - then you tell me if it matters that this person is unwilling, or unable to look into your eyes? Does the inability to match ones gaze lead itself to more or less inherent trustworthiness?
I am one of those that can communicate effectively but cannot make eye contact with the other party. Simply can't. I never could. If I try to look him/her/them in the eyes I am loosing control, can't find my words, losing the train of thought and focus.
This inability brought me a lot of disadvantages in time. For example, I've been underperforming at all interviews and oral exams.
I suspect eye contact is rather engrained in our species. It’s a very important part of communication, or so I’ve been told and experienced.
I’ve definitely seen people disadvantaged by being unwilling or unable to look others in the eyes while having a conversation. But I’m not sure we should go as far as discouraging it because some people feel aggressed by being looked at.
At the same time we can all endeavour to be more understanding that people not being able to make eye contact doesn’t necessarily mean much.
> I suspect eye contact is rather engrained in our species. It’s a very important part of communication, or so I’ve been told and experienced.
Except as has been pointed out several times in this thread, the two most populous countries in the world consider it rude, which means your opinion is probably a minority opinion worldwide and not really so ingrained.
I thought I was okay with eye contact because I look at people's eyes when they're talking instead of their shoes. I had no idea it was supposed to be a two-way communication of whose turn it's going to be!
Even for people who think eye contact is important during a conversation - please, you don't want to do this while driving a vehicle. Keep your eyes on the road and have a normal conversation without looking at the other person. It's a major safety hazard, as bad as texting and driving.
I hate it when TV shows, reality or drama have people do this, especially in normal circumstances/ normal people (obviously a serial killer or other criminal, it is kind of weird if they were super concerned about road safety).
This study mentions but provides no data or analysis for how their study is impacted by or was affected by the differences between nuerotypical and autistic samples. Which is a shame because as an autistic person who doesn’t like eye contact, I think those findings would have been much more insightful and potentially groundbreaking. My hope is the authors have plans to look closer at that.
you say typical, which means you already recognize the exceptions are exceptions, which makes this into nothing more than an observation that exceptions exist, but exceptions exist in everything, and so it is an uninteresting no-op of an observation. You could say "except for the exceptions" about everything on every topic.
2 + 2 = 4 in any base system 5 or higher, not just 10
Anyway I agree with your argument and am not trying to nullify it with this tangential correction
To add to the chain of tangential corrections, it is incorrect to state that you are correcting a mistake. What your parent said was in fact a true statement, you just generalized it a bit.
This is so silly because roughy 15% of people or 1 in 6 people is neurodivergent.
Or stated another way if you would feel squeamish about playing Russian Roulette then you’re making the same bet if you make judgments about someone you’re not sure is neurodivergent.
If we play this game at the margins every human in the US is female and there’s some exceptions.
Things there’s fewer of than neurodivergent people.
or... it's already the default baseline that everything ever written about any chaotic system from humans to frogs to cells to the weather, is already understood to only ever be expressable in any other terms than percentages, averages, generalizations. All facts or observations are already only some percentage. especially for humans, especially for behavior, especially for behavior in humans. It's frankly ridiculous to mention, like any other truism.
You could add a ridiculous qualifier on practically every other word in any statement on any subject, and that doesn't make them go from false to true, it makes them go from useful to useless.
Wow. Do you feel the same way about feminism? Racism? Do you doubt the existence or severity of ADHD, ASD, etc?
In case there was any doubt on that last point, consider that each of those lower lifespan by about 30 years, have ~15X higher suicide rates, and are 1:2 are not able to work full time.
Insults are in the eye of the beholder. For a person with a disorder marked by issues with eye contact and understanding social nuances, imagining insults that aren’t there IS the disability’s effect.
If you comment on how much a black person enjoys watermelon and you do so objectively without malice, it’s still fair for that to be considered a big insult. Why? Because it has been used as a derogatory stereotype for many years.
If you want to understand the perspective of neurodivergents, look up the terms “allistic” and “ableism”.
When anybody hallucinates an insult where there was none, that is their own problem. You can't hold people accountable for offenses they never committed, for insults they never uttered, just because some crazy person hallucinates an offense.
When you walk into a situation that has an intergenerational history rife with 'hallucinations' you don't immediately start talking about pink elephants.
Stirring up a bad situation is not blameless behavior. It's the favorite realm of children, narcissists and saboteurs.
No, it's the same ableist nonsense that's been spewed since at least the Victorian era. If you're not making intense eye contact during difficult conversations you're not engaged, you're weak and undeserving of the respect you deny others.
There are way, way more people who are alike in this way than are blind or deaf. Because it's not visible it's a 'safe' form of discrimination.
As someone you are referring to, though not on the spectrum, I can say confidently that eye contact has a negative impact on my following of a conversation. This is more true when the conversation requires more thought to contribute meaningfully.
Perhaps interesting is that I do have a mild form of Tourette's syndrome. Eye contact for me very quickly becomes "itchy" and there is a lot of focus required to ignore that feeling for a lengthy conversation.
I'm sure that if you make any eye contact during conversation it marks the rise and fall of shared attention even if the correlation is lesser or maybe a lot lesser for you. Unless you're saying you do make eye contact but it's when your attention has lapsed, which I doubt is what you're saying but correct me if wrong!
That said I've personally almost never made eye contact in 42 years of life, but I do look at mouths which nobody has ever noticed isn't eye contact, and I'm sure serves the same purpose. If all you ever do is look away, it would be interesting to hear if you think there are other things that might serve the same "signal shared attention" functionality for you.
I'll also note that autism isn't the only way to be atypical, and sure wouldn't be surprised if eye contact signals shared attention just as much in ADHD folks as in neurotypical folks (but would be very interested in finding out if that's true or not).
At a local Burger King drive-through, there's an attendant who looks off to the side while handing me stuff through the window. It was a learning moment for me: "so that's what other people see when I'm talking to them!"
Just about to say that. I've worked with a few very talented engineers who simply wouldn't look anyone in the eye during conversation, but focused their full attention on the subject under discussion.
Could you clarify what you might expect from a similar analysis performed on neuralatypicals? For example, would eye contact play little to no role in shared attention between two autistic people? I ask in part because I don't think I know that much about the autistic experience.
I would suspect significantly reduced eye contact between autistic and Nuerotypicals and between autistic and autistic social pairings. My central question would be in high masking autistic individuals does there masking ability relate somehow to eye contact? And if so… by how much? Similarly in autistic-autistic pairings how much eye contact is required for autistic people to communicate well with each other? In my experience, and in some recent studies we see that autistic people can communicate seamlessly with other autistic people without the need for eye contact.
This study asserts that eye contact is required for good social engagement and communication. What I am challenging is that that finding is probably only true in Nuerotypical samples and is probably not present in autistic people.
> And if so… by how much? Similarly in autistic-autistic pairings how much eye contact is required for autistic people to communicate well with each other?
As a neurotypical person, this is actually pretty interesting to me as well. I live in the US and here we are always taught to make eye contact when speaking to someone, as it shows as sign that you are "engaged" with that person. It's something so ingrained in you from a young age here that you start to think that this is how all humans should communicate.
Neurodivergent people just tend to ignore those social constructs, makes me wonder if we as neurotypical people play all these social games and a neurodivergent person just looks at all that as window dressing that isn't required.
> Neurodivergent people just tend to ignore those social constructs, makes me wonder if we as neurotypical people play all these social games and a neurodivergent person just looks at all that as window dressing that isn't required.
I can only speak for my own view, which is that I find making eye contact uncomfortable, and I find that when I do make eye contact it seems like I must be “doing it wrong” because it seems to make others uncomfortable too. Granted I may be reading others’ reactions wrong, the possibility of which contributes to my own discomfort!
> a neurodivergent person just looks at all that as window dressing that isn't required.
This seems like a hypothesis that we could test. For instance, by rationally explaining the practical utility of eye contact, to detect earnestness or deception. Then ask them to attempt this, and see if they can bring themselves to even try. My guess is most neurodivergents who avoid eye contact will find that eye contact remains too uncomfortable to even attempt it. This would show that their eye contact avoidance is not merely a matter of them not seeing any utility in a pointless social game.
As pointed out in another thread, the population of cultures in the world where not making eye contact is the social norm likely exceeds that where it is, so no - not neurotypical population.
Thank you for the re-welcome! I've been in "science" for 15 years now, it's always good to be welcomed again.
You should know that the cohort you would like studied was actually referenced in the article as a further avenue of study and an additional publication! So your critique of the current study is actually just a complaint that it isn't your cohort. They've outlined their materials and methods, you could maybe do a study yourself?
"These findings raise many questions for further research—both for typical and atypical neurological populations—about how attentional states are modulated during interaction with downstream consequences on how minds engage with each other"
In school I used to find that a lot of teachers talked to the class while looking at me for largish periods of time. I think it was because I kept eye-contact with the teacher a lot (or more than others in the class). Not that I was a 'goody two shoes' (quite the reverse) but I did remain attentive and focused on the teacher's face (and eyes).
In person I tend to look into people's eyes for mostly the whole conversation (easily 95% of the time) when I'm either listening or talking minus natural breaks to react to a noise or event that warrants looking away. I've had really long chats like this where I never got a hint someone was weirded out.
Honestly I couldn't even imagine talking with someone without looking at them. In my mind that would be one of the rudest things you could do, especially if they're the one talking. I also wonder if this comes down to how you feel about yourself. I think when you're looking at someone's eyes you know what they're looking at it. For me, knowing where they're looking makes me more relaxed.
I'm in the US and don't recall ever being brought up a certain way, it just "feels" right to do the above.
This does not resonate with me. I need to look off into infinity if I’m saying anything taxing and that’s hard to do if I’m focusing on someone’s eyes.
I am not gonna lie, I don’t look at people in the eyes because I can sometimes see that they’re lying to my face. You don’t need to make such a personal connection every single time you engage in a conversation with people. Most people are not worth that type of attention.
