We don’t know when we’re tiny that it’s the eyes that we use in order to see. Yet, infants look us in the eye. And animals look us in the eye. Why? And how is it that when the pupil is turned toward the front, we interpret this as being looked at? How does this come about? How is it that when a person’s nose is facing us, we don’t feel anything in particular, but when their eyes are facing us, we DO feel something? How is it that we can communicate via eye to eye contact, but not via eye to ear or eye to elbow contact? What makes eye contact so special - in our species and in others? I mean, even birds seem to look at us in the eye. I think it’s really peculiar when you think about it.
I’m not sure if this is the same question or not. But it seems more logical to me that when someone is talking to me, I should be looking at their mouth, because lip-reading (even if done subconsciously) will enhance my comprehension of what they’re saying. In other words, lip-reading will reduce the number of times I have to ask a mumbler what he said.
So why do I look him in the eye? I’ve even tried, on several occasions, to deliberately watch their mouth, and I find it very difficult; my eyes keep moving back to their eyes. Why is that?
It’s because the eye is the window to the soul.
I believe that it does not take a human being too long to realize that the eyes reveal much, in terms of nonverbal communication.
I know this isnt entirely what you want, but from what I understand not everything we know is learned. This reminds me of a story I read about a man blind from birth, yet he knew how to draw the typical flying bird silhouette (of course it is possible he was taught this at some point unknowingly). We understand certain basic things without learning them directly. Babies and other animals look you in the eye because that is how they were “made” to look at you.
Why? I have no idea. Id presume because you can tell a lot about a persons emotions through the eyes themselves and the muscles around them.
“We don’t know when we’re tiny that it’s the eyes that we use in order to see.”
I am not sure about this. Can anyone who knows about child development confirm that young babies don’t know we use eyes to see yet engage in eye contact?
When my cats look at my eyes, they learn what I am looking at and paying attention to. This is useful information to them.
When humans look into each others’ eyes, they know they are paying attention to each other and they both know that they both know it. I.e.: “I know you interest* me. You know I interest you. We are aware of boths facts and of the mutuality our knowledge of it.” There is also an element of this among animals. Among them, prolonged eye contact is nearly always hostile.
- An interest which can be positive or negative. The longer the eye contact, the more intense it tends to be and to be perceived as.
Part of it is cultural, and so great a part that we don’t even realize it.
For me, one of the difficult parts of working in international environments is remembering who should I “stare at” much longer than it would be polite back home, who should I not even “glance at”, etc. Same with things such as distance and touching (many cultures touch more often than average-Americans, but more softly; others touch less; how and when you touch can be linked to gender and social status…)
Looking into someone’s eyes carries several messages and serves several purposes:
- it says you’re paying attention
- it’s a challenge
- it lets you “read” the person’s intent to move, better than looking somewhere else
For you, that 1 is what’s most important: you look people in the eye. For cultures which reckon that Americans “stare”, 2 is most important, so “staring into people’s eyes” is to be avoided. And for individuals who have very bad sight (severely farsighted, astigmatism), 3 is pretty much useless.
One of the documents in wikileaks which got reported around (sorry, I’ve tried searching but several of the words are just too common) was one from the US Embassy in Spain stating that “minister José Blanco is not to be trusted, as he doesn’t look people in the eye”. Spanish comentary can be summed up as: “he’s a politician, of course he can’t be trusted, plus dude is blind as an owl and that’s why he doesn’t look people in the eye; heck, he doesn’t look at anybody who’s less than 5 meters away, period…”. The glasses Blanco wears now look normal, but in old pictures he appears with coke-bottle ones, plus his whole body language when he walks says “I hope that’s the door and not just a dark rectangle some buffoon painted”.
Did you know that, while smiling comes naturally, the specifics of it are learned? And, while laughing comes naturally, making noise when you laugh is learned? Same with how you look at people: looking at the person you’re having a conversation with comes naturally, but the details are learned.
One smoking gun on the autism checklist is whether or not one makes eye contact. One of the tests on my duaghter was blowing up a ballon, holding it out at arms length and after 15seconds letting the ballon go flying around. Autism spectrum kids tend to only stare at the ballon. Neurotypical kids will look expectantly from the ballon to the ballon holders face, back to the ballon, back to the face.
Part of our brain seems to be hard wired to recognize faces. Babies are born with it, and don’t have to learn it. I’ve read that babies are actually better at facial recognition than adults are (though I’m not sure exactly how they came to that conclusion).
Babies instinctively look for eyes, nose, and a mouth, but oddly, they don’t have to be arranged properly on your face for a baby to interpret it as a face.
I don’t know what evolutionary benefit this has (if any) but it does seem to be hard wired into our brains. It seems to be hard wired into some animals as well, since they don’t need to be taught it either.
while it might be true looking at someones elbow doesn’t communicate try staring at a girls cleavage. They’ll notice that.
I’m the opposite. I cannot look at people in the eyes, especially when they’re talking to me.
I focus on the mouth.
I’ve been told this makes many people uncomfortable, but I just can’t do it. Eye-looking feels to me like an incredible confrontational move. I just can’t do it.
I’ve learned to spot other fellow shifty-eyed people in the wild, though. One of my profs will look everywhere in the room except right at you when he’s talking to you. It’s interesting because he also has a very strong personality–very willful and very adept at getting his way. So it’s good to know us shifty-eyed people don’t have to be timid. However, said prof is intensely disliked. Perhaps he would not be so disliked if he could look you in the eyes when he talked, so you felt convinced by a friend rather than rolled over by a force of nature. I don’t know, maybe that’s how it works?
I doubt this–we share the (noise-making) laugh reflex with mammals as distinct from us as rats. But I’d find it believable that the particular noise a person makes is (at least in part) learned.
I don’t usually look people in the eye. Most of the time I look at their nose, since it’s the center of the face. How close do people have to be to be able to tell the difference between me looking at their eyes and their nose?
I sometimes notice people doing this. It makes me uncomfortable as I think maybe I have something dangling from my nostril. 
However, I find it hard to look people in the eye, too. I’m better at it than I used to be, but I still have to consciously make an effort to do it. Then I sometimes find myself concentrating so much on making proper eye contact that I forget to listen to what they’re actually saying. :smack:
My gosh, that sounds strange to me. Here’s why: I was raised to believe that staring is very rude. Also, because of how I was raised I draw a clear distinction between “staring” and making normal eye contact in conversation. The former is bad and the latter is preferable.
I’m constantly disconcerted by how much immigrants from Latin America stare at strangers in public places. As far as I know, Latinos born and raised in the U.S. don’t do this. It seems to be very much a south of the border thing. Both men and women. Frequently when I go shopping or whatever, I become uncomfortably aware of these eyes just fixated on me. When I look back at the starer and make eye contact, they don’t get shy to have been caught staring; they just hold my eye contact with the same fixed stare, for an indefinitely long time. That makes me feel really weird.
When I was interviewing for the Census, I got assigned all the Spanish interviews in my local group, because I was the only one able to speak Spanish well enough. Once I went into an apartment with 4 gentlemen from Mexico none of whom spoke English. They invited me in, I sat on the sofa, and interviewed them all at once. They were all perfectly courteous and did not stare at all. They made just enough eye contact to carry the conversation when I directly addressed them. So that was a perfectly fine situation. The same was true of all the other interviews I did in Spanish, no problem at all.
The point is that the extreme staring only happens when I’m a stranger in passing and there is no speaking involved. I just don’t understand it, culturally.
I don’t know if you meant this as a joke, but I think it might be partly true.
No matter what you believe or otherwise about souls, it’s obviously true that the eyes are the interface between our visual processing machinery and the outside world. That is, if you have to define a viewpoint from which we see the world, including people in it, that point is by definition, the eyes.
Now, I need to stray into anecdote (nonetheless aware we’re in GQ). In my personal case, the above obvious fact makes me feel that my ‘self’ is something that lives behind the windows of my eyes.
If someone standing close by points at my feet, hands, abdomen or chest, I’m likely to perceive that as them pointing at part of my body, whereas if they point at my head/eyes, I’m likely to perceive that as them pointing at me.
I don’t expect that’s the same for everyone in the world, but I also don’t think I’ll be unique in this regard, in which case it could be a factor in the question at hand. ‘Look at me!’ is something people often say when they specifically mean ‘look me in the eyes’
Because when I look people in the boobs, they don’t seem to take me seriously.
Just so, which is why I raised the questions originally, and why I wish I could craft at least one researchable question that would place this more securely in GQ.
I ran a poll thread on it one time, here
I’ve seen deaf-from-birth people laughing, sometimes so hard they fell off the chair: no noise. They were red-faced, hugging their aching sides, swaying from side to side, choking… but no noise. Several different people, in very different locations. The thing they had in common was complete deafness from birth. The noise of laughing has no information to them, so it’s not there when they laugh.