I just realised why I love popo’s angle so much - it makes me feel like I’m in a scifi story and strong AI is a real thing.
Well, actually… the eye contact situation might be enough to do just that, if the context is amenable. In the most obvious example, person A is in a singles bar, and observes person B give them an appraising look, followed by eye contact and a slight smile. Person A finds person B attractive, so follows suit, which in that context is intended, and generally interpreted, as an invitiation for person B to approach. Or person A is at a party, wearing a t-shirt displaying some aspect of the wearer’s personality, and sees person B looking at the shirt, followed by eye contact with a grin. If person A doesn’t respond dismissively, person B may approach with a comment about the subject on the shirt.
I’m quite deaf, and so I have to rely very heavily on body language. I have the reverse problem from a lot of people; some people have very little body language and rely on tone of voice to get their feelings across. This can lead to problems in such a case when apparently without warning they become angry and aggressive. I simply have to identify such people and take good care to avoid them. The mobile phone was a big benefit because the superior audio quality and volume compared to the old analog phones gives me more auditory cues to follow.
To summarise; it’s the people who (for instance) do not make eye contact with clear signalling that I find very difficult, which is why it’s an important subject for me and why I responded to @popobawa4u in the first place (and provoked this diversion.)
Sorry to keep posting on this subject but you reminded me of something else - the need to smile constantly is a very US thing. Many European cultures don’t, and I have in the past had problems taking US visitors (from the midwest where exposure to other cultures was minimal) around France, Italy and Germany; they became very uncomfortable talking to people who don’t feel the need to smile unless something significantly amusing has happened. Learning Russian is proving interesting because, like French, tone variation is of little importance - a benefit to a deaf person - but modes of address are very important indeed, and the four or five different ways of addressing a person have a lot of significance.
Human communication seems designed to make things hard for computers.
This is indeed an issue. Here in the Midwest we are obsessed with being “nice”. Not good, and not even nice, but “nice”. We want to be as pleasant as possible, so we smile all the time and never talk about unpleasant topics or criticize people directly or be confrontational in any way. This unnerves the shit out of the Russians and was a big part of their anti-US propaganda. I’ve never understood why we do this, because it seems to be only a US thing, and specifically only a Midwest thing. This also makes communication almost impossible for me as an autistic person. I appreciate directness and literalness, and find it exhausting to have to unpack the meaning behind every silence and every avoidance of a topic and every piece of faux pleasant chit chat.
Almost Japanese, in fact. Natives of Chicago and NY (in my experience) have trouble understanding that Japanese “we’ll think about it” is a firm no; Midwesterners, in my experience, not so much.
I wonder if this means people who have to do this kind of unpacking have more insight into what motivates the socially conditioned behaviour like ‘being nice’ than those who practice it themselves?
Practising wrote portrayal of ‘how-to-express-emotions-within-my-social-envelope’ to my mind is much like the Chinese room problem. People who do it seem to almost be on auto-pilot. Like it’s being generated and expressed on some autonomous level of the psyche, apart from the personality but somehow co-dependant with it at the same time.
Actually trying to determine a motivation or, heaven-forbid, an intention seems almost always to be considered to be far beside the point IME.
Social cues about level of comfort or participation/support/allegiance etc seem to operate on this vapid level of ‘strokes’ (as per trans-personal psych) and to be almost completely devoid of any information other than that concerned with establishing social hierarchy or, as I said, some kind of display of comfort in the present situation. And then maybe some actual information about something may be dropped in at random.
I guess I should consider myself lucky to live in a place which considers direct, frank and specific (often bordering on confrontational) communication the norm. Although I still run into trouble with the social communication all the time. Not so much with the unpacking, which I have sort of managed to eventually pick up as fairly functioning intuitive ability, but just with being really pissed off by the underlying psychology of that stupid shite most of the time.
I would lump Chicago in with the rest of the Midwest. Chicagoans are not as nonconfrontational as the stereotypical Minnesotan, but still way less confrontational than people from Boston or New York.
Contact can imply action over a distance, but it implies that distance is somehow closed by the action undertaken. A person knowing that they are being gazed upon does not somehow become socially closer than if they weren’t gazed upon, or not aware of it
Define “closed”.
If someone’s gaze meets yours, even if accidentally, it is at this point that you’ve acknowledged each other’s presence at the very least. From now on you cannot ignore having seen that person and that person can no longer ignore having seen you and having been seen by you.
There’s no need for any mutual understanding of the rules for eye contact, you saw he saw you, he looked you directly in the eye, you are now both aware of each other. You have now made eye contact.
There’s no obligation to either of you for having done so, and even if you are not good with body language you may yet be able to discern if it’s intentional or not.
You may not find meaning in the act of making eye contact, I get that, that doesn’t mean that you are unable to make eye contact.
This sounds very neurotypical. Of course there are rules for eye contact, even if you’ve internalized them enough to no longer be aware of them. If you don’t believe me, go into a job interview, stare at the floor the whole time, and see if you get the job or not. Or, stare intently at some random stranger without ever breaking eye contact. I’m not sure where that will get you, but probably nowhere good.
I actually cannot make eye contact because it’s too intense for me. I can usually fake eye contact by looking at the eyebrows or glasses frames, but I can’t fake it well, and I can’t sustain eye contact for very long at all.
I have no intention of changing how popo acts, I certainly have no hope in changing how he perceives the world. If anything, my comments are only attempting to bridge understanding as he has seeked it out.
I do not believe my comments are useful to anybody other than popo, (and even that’s in question), and I’ve been working on the assumption that he is able to make eye contact yet derives no meaning from it.
Yes, my comments are neurotypical by necessity, not by design. Please be assured my only attempt at relevance is to the conversation at hand with popo.
People seeing each other’s eyes can easily happen, but I think that people insisting that this is “contact” gets pretentious, mostly because they are insisting upon a shared understanding of its supposed significance. Any time when people demand that you share their assumptions (and thus single you out for being “difficult” if you don’t) is coercive and overbearing - especially when it involves you minding your own business.
From how people are describing it here, what many call body language sounds far more like a protocol. But a protocol and a language aren’t strictly the same. The difference is that I try to use a protocol which would help us to communicate things which each other might actually need to know.
I can do well with non-verbal communication with babies and non-humans, but the difference is those instances are communication about far simpler things. It shuts off most potential areas of discussion. I can’t discuss cooking, home improvement, event planning, or hobbies with them. So when I encounter people who use actual spoken language, I try to use this, because it is robust enough and has sufficient bandwidth for actual topics of conversation.
There is also a “golden rule” fail here. I think that actually asking somebody what they think or feel is far more respectful than me trying to guess about it. It demonstrates that I am interested and affords them formal recognition. But to another person, they might interpret my refusal to guess about them to be disrespectful. Unfortunately, defaulting to seeing people with what I think are positive qualities such as dignity, maturity, and rationality often gets be accused of being aloof at best, or a condescending jerk at worst. People often speak of “respect” being a simple matter of making the effort, despite many not agreeing about what even constitutes respect.
I read somewhere recently about common postures for (western) men and women while talking. Women commonly talk facing each other, and eye contact and the information carried by it is more important. Lack of eye contact is evasive or furtive. Men more commonly sit or stand beside each other and face something else. Sustained eye contact is too intense, threatening, confrontational.
Sometimes there’s the idea that men can’t understand body language at all, but at least in my case I’m not even looking at the other persons face. In facial recognition and body language tests, I’m supposedly better than most neurotypicals. In practice, its too much information to process at once - what the other person is saying, what their body language is saying, how I want to respond, whatever other distractions are in the background… It’s better to look away, then I can actually concentrate on what they’re saying.
Plus, if you ignore body language you’re missing a lot of drama and emotional manipulation, which is not a bad thing in my book.
But it is not actually about anything! There is no subject, no content.
This I certainly agree with. I am acutely aware of when somebody is trying to influence my emotional state, and I avoid them. It is also why I, not unlike @Melizmatic, go out of my way to avoid advertisements.
This is part of how I process honesty. Many accuse me of either being emotionless, or disrespecting people’s emotions. But I think it is more important to really deeply know what one’s and others emotions are, and that means not trying to change them. Somebody who cares about me is going to try to know how I actually feel, rather than deciding that I should feel some other way. Like with meditation, which some describe with the analogy of stopping the ripples on a pond so you can see a more accurate reflection of your self. Being more interested in influencing a person’s feelings than being open to them is like skipping stones across the still waters in front of that person.
Speaking of NOT getting body language… what do you think it means when someone posts something that could be controversial and ends their post with a winking emoji?
@jsroberts - wait, so first you say that women talk face to face and use eye contact ie; body language a lot… and then you dismiss body language as full of drama and manipulation… ok then. Glad we’re text based.
Also, just to counter all this, MrPants is incapable of talking with out direct eye contact. So much so that he will get in my way while I’m cooking supper so that I have to look at him while he’s telling me something about his day. Literally will stand between me and the stove as I’m trying to cook. He does this unconsciously and without malice and he shooes to the other side of the room when I as but it is a weekly occurrence in our house.
Winking usually seems quite ambiguous to me. At least with text, I can be sure that it was intended as a wink, and not some other gesture or involuntary movement. Sometimes I guess I might know what they mean, but usually not. It still seems like a drive to confuse emotion - what one feels - with communication. Feelings are only “displayed” if we are willing to see ourselves and each other as stereotypes. That is the “acceptable tradeoff” of implicit communication styles. I am not comfortable with that.
Winking, in a forum like this one, using an emoji like this one generally denotes amusement, or a mild joke or witticisim.
Winking in real life can be either the same as above … OR … an indication of flirting or interest in a mate. To figure out which is which you’ll have to bone up on your body language cues. Which is somewhat ironic…?
I’m not dismissing all of it, just saying that not getting a lot of body language isn’t all bad. People know that if they tell me something, I’ll take them literally. If that’s not what they wanted, then I’ll just reiterate my rule for dealing with people. It may work for some people, but trying to guess other people’s internal world doesn’t tend to work out well for me. As for it being more of a women’s thing, it’s a tool. Some people use it to manipulate, some demonstrate the better aspects of empathy. As you pointed out, women tend to be better at using it either way, but it’s not just women who do. I’m certainly not calling women manipulative as a group.
No, I would simply ask, despite knowing that many would think I am weird for not playing the game. Or assume that they would tell me on their own if it was important enough.
