This meme shows that conversation is not needed for enjoyable eye contact.
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That’s because respect is earned.
Well, I’ll bear that in mind when I am in Australia and near indigenous populations. But as I am not, you’ll have to pardon me by going with the local playbook.
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In most Native American cultures that I know, staring someone in the eyes is a massive form of disrespect. It’s just creepy and weird to stare someone in the eyes, unless you wish to fight them or come on to them.
Europeans for years thought Native people were furtive and shifty because of this. Native people thought Europeans were land grabbing douchebags always trying to start a fight.
My own take is this: Most primates, and even dogs and cats, regard direct eye contact as a form of domination and a prelude to a fight. Maybe Europeans just learned a hyper-aggressive way of human transaction from being repeatedly, over a millennium, conquered over and over and over by other Europeans.
Indeed!
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just keep trying, you’ll get there
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They had a point!
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As someone with almost no unconscious ability to perform the minutia of interpersonal social interaction, I basically had to learn to do all I needed consciously. Eventually it became fluent and I no longer needed to be cognizant of every step, just engage the right algorithm, but it still takes a fraction of my concentration. That’s why, while I do increasingly enjoy social interaction, it’s draining and I have to re-charge with alone time. I like your analogy, because the overall process is very much like a moderately difficult dance.
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I was able to make some casual observations in a restaurant yesterday evening. I really think that you are onto something. Most of the people in the restaurant averted eye contact with the people they were talking to a majority of the time. One of the few persons who exerted a continuous stare was a neighbour. As he was close enough, I could get the conversation and he was trying to convince his interlocutor of some dodgy work scheme.
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I think we will find countless examples of this. It was the same in France, you would lower your gaze in fromt of people with higher ranks. Women, in particular, were taught to lower their gaze in sign of modesty, pupils were taught nit to stare back at their teachers, etc…
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And this is one (of many) things that contributes to getting longer prison sentences because the judges read too much into people not looking them in the eye. Assuming other people’s intent based on cultural signals does real world damage.
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A judge doing that is not fit for the job, I would say. It is part of their job to know and consider cultural differences.
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FWIW, I was trained to work with crime victims, to help them through the medical and legal system, and as such come with them to court if needed. You’d better believe we were taught cultural differences as part of our training. This was for volunteer work, not a highly paid career position, and in the mid-1980s, so there’s no excuse for a judge in 2019.
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And to be fair, I don’t know if this is nearly as much a problem today as it used to be, but I wouldn’t possibly believe it’s gone away completely, and there is always some new subtle thing that no one even realizes they are doing to find out about.
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More observations about eye contact…
Other cultures have marks of social status in their dresses and langage (think about honorifics in Japanese, for example). English is almost devoid of honorifics and everybody is dressed in jeans and t-shirt in the usa.
Could it be that gaze is used to determine and indicate social status? As in: people gaze at each other and the first to lower his or her gaze acknowledges lower rank? Could it be that the prejudice against eye contact avoidance is actually a prejudice against people who avoid clearly stating their rank in this manner?
Remember what I was saying about people who can’t stand not getting eye contact and who demand it from others? People who want to control even your involuntary eye movements are not good people. I’ll look any of you in the eyes for that one.
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Like, say, on the telephone?
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This reminds me of an hilarious (and quite cheeky for the time) bit of dialogue (heavily paraphrased) from that old, TV comedy “Soap”:
Woman 1: “I like looking at my boyfriend’s face when we’re making love.”
Woman 2 (expressing disgust): “The face?!”
Did the National Institute for the Blind conduct the study?
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