# Why do we look others in the eye? **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [September 11, 2011, 2:33am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-we-look-others-in-the-eye/595908 "2011-09-11T02:33:22Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 15\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![constanze](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/f9ae1b/32.png) [@constanze](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/constanze)\ **Post date:** [September 12, 2011, 7:55am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-we-look-others-in-the-eye/595908/21 "2011-09-12T07:55:51Z")
> [@Johanna](#): > > 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. An American doesn’t have to look far to find a culture where direct eye-contact = staring = offensive/ challenging: some Native American tribes have that. So in American culture “doesn’t look me directly in the eyes = shifty and untrustworthy; looks me directly in the eyes = honest and straight” where in other cultures “looks me directly in the eyes = aggressive and challenging, has no manners or respect; doesn’t look me directly in the eyes = knows good manners, shows the proper respect”, which leads to misunderstandings. Usually, it’s the length of time, as Nava said, which changes a “I’m looking into your eyes to show I’m paying attention” to “I’m challenging you by staring at you” - and that length varies by culture. That some cultures don’t do direct looking at all, only glancing, and hence all looking = staring for them is one end of the sliding scale. Even in English, though, there are expressions like “Are you staring at me?” in bars or hierarchies, or “eyeballing a higher-ranking person/officer” being expressively forbidden. ---
**Author:** ![Frylock](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/ce7236/32.png) [@Frylock](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Frylock)\ **Post date:** [September 12, 2011, 10:44am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-we-look-others-in-the-eye/595908/22 "2011-09-12T10:44:06Z")
> [@Nava](#): > > 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. Perhaps they learned to laugh noiselessly. [This](http://deafexpressions.blogspot.com/2010/07/questions-stupidity-and-answers.html) (unfortunately confrontational) page written by a deaf person suggests that deaf people typically make noise when they laugh, and that the sound of this laughter is often said to be unpleasant to hearing people. I know that vocalization is something of a political issue in the Deaf community, so I wouldn’t take any lack of vocalization in any particular context as evidence of much since there’s a real possibility they’re refraining from vocalizing as a result of either their own politics or that of their parents. ---
**Author:** ![Themenin](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/ee59a6/32.png) [@Themenin](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Themenin)\ **Post date:** [September 12, 2011, 5:33pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-we-look-others-in-the-eye/595908/23 "2011-09-12T17:33:10Z")
The eyes can signal intention. In a fight situation, or an “I’m about to be eaten by a tiger” situation this would be valuable information. On a more simple level, the first thing I want to know when I look at you is whether you’re aware of me - the direction of your gaze will probably answer that question. Or yeah - the eyes are the windows of the soul. ---
**Author:** ![Leaffan](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/leaffan/32/299_2.png) [@Leaffan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Leaffan)\ **Post date:** [September 12, 2011, 5:46pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-we-look-others-in-the-eye/595908/24 "2011-09-12T17:46:22Z")
I would think animals that didn’t develop this way were selected out. The eye can tell a lot about intention. My dog and I stare into the eyes of one another all the time. I find it interesting that she does this with me. ---
**Author:** ![OpalCat](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/o/8edcca/32.png) [@OpalCat](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/OpalCat)\ **Post date:** [September 12, 2011, 10:10pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-we-look-others-in-the-eye/595908/25 "2011-09-12T22:10:02Z")
At least one of my cats will start purring if I look him in the eyes for very long. Then he’ll do these really deliberate slow blinks and we’ll blink back and forth at each other. Then we usually start talking to each other and he’ll jump into my lap or something, but there is definitely some kind of eye-to-eye communication that gets started. I have no idea why. I tend to look people in the eye, but sometimes it makes me nervous. And if I’m nervous I can never tell how appropriate my eye-looking is… I start getting shifty eyed because I’m worried that I’m staring, then I try to stop being shifty eyed because I don’t want to be seen as shifty eyed… arg. It is a bizarre instinct. ---
**Author:** ![Cartooniverse](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/cartooniverse/32/3084_2.png) [@Cartooniverse](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Cartooniverse)\ **Post date:** [September 12, 2011, 10:36pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-we-look-others-in-the-eye/595908/26 "2011-09-12T22:36:43Z")
I also look people in the eye. If I’m sitting close enough, I shift from one eye to the other and back again. I do it because it shows I am being extremely attentive to their non-verbal body language - which includes facial expression and eye movement- as well as their spoken words. Like **OpalCat** , I’m quite aware when I’m skeeving someone out with my eye contact. I will glance away now and again, but when I look back, I look at them. And yeah, I do try to look at their eyes not their cleavage. 😃 ---
**Author:** ![CC](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/f1d935/32.png) [@CC](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/CC)\ **Post date:** [September 12, 2011, 10:54pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-we-look-others-in-the-eye/595908/27 "2011-09-12T22:54:36Z")
> [@Leaffan](#): > > …The eye can tell a lot about intention… Phrases such as this, and reference to souls, place this thread much more in the realm of common beliefs and probably are better in IMHO, although I really hoped to find something more substantial. If someone has some information regarding our innate tendency to fixate on eyes, I’d like to read about it. xo, C. ---
**Author:** ![Leaffan](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/leaffan/32/299_2.png) [@Leaffan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Leaffan)\ **Post date:** [September 13, 2011, 1:33am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-we-look-others-in-the-eye/595908/28 "2011-09-13T01:33:20Z")
> [@CC](#): > > Phrases such as this, and reference to souls, place this thread much more in the realm of common beliefs and probably are better in IMHO, although I really hoped to find something more substantial. If someone has some information regarding our innate tendency to fixate on eyes, I’d like to read about it. xo, C. Yeah, well why did you omit the first part of my response then: > [@](#): > > I would think animals that didn’t develop this way were selected out. I think this is entirely germane to the topic. Surviving species are those who gained valuable information from reading the eyes of friends and foe. Unsuccessful species are toast. Seems plausible, no? ---
**Author:** ![CC](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/f1d935/32.png) [@CC](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/CC)\ **Post date:** [September 13, 2011, 2:53am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-we-look-others-in-the-eye/595908/29 "2011-09-13T02:53:18Z")
> [@Leaffan](#): > > Surviving species are those who gained valuable information from reading the eyes of friends and foe. Unsuccessful species are toast. Seems plausible, no? I think there’s something to this, except that I doubt that the information comes from the eyes, alone. Again, I’m sure that there are experiments that explore how much information comes from the entire face, and how much comes from the eyes. I think we all know people, for example, who smile with their mouths, but not with their eyes. Even so, eye contact is something else, again. ---
**Author:** ![Nava](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/da6949/32.png) [@Nava](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Nava)\ **Post date:** [September 13, 2011, 8:52am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-we-look-others-in-the-eye/595908/30 "2011-09-13T08:52:25Z")
> [@Johanna](#): > > 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. If they’re recent immigrants, they may be overshooting. It happened to me, it happened to my coworkers in that summer job I took back when adult elephants were knee-high to gnus, it happened to my classmates in graduate school, it happened to other recent imports I met years later. We’d been told, time and again, to “look people in the eye”; we’d been told by our teachers/bosses/coworkers who were much closer than we would have liked after such a short time to “look at me”; it took us a while to figure out the new standards. In some cases that while was well over a year, even though we already spoke English and were doing our best to integrate. ---
**Author:** ![MLS](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/919ad9/32.png) [@MLS](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MLS)\ **Post date:** [September 13, 2011, 5:16pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-we-look-others-in-the-eye/595908/31 "2011-09-13T17:16:05Z")
> [@OpalCat](#): > > At least one of my cats will start purring if I look him in the eyes for very long. Then he’ll do these really deliberate slow blinks and we’ll blink back and forth at each other. Then we usually start talking to each other and he’ll jump into my lap or something, but there is definitely some kind of eye-to-eye communication that gets started. I have no idea why. It’s the slow blink that does it. To a cat, staring means “I’m keeping an eye on you; I don’t trust you.” Closing your eyes means, “I trust you, see, I can even close my eyes.” ---
**Author:** ![CC](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/f1d935/32.png) [@CC](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/CC)\ **Post date:** [September 13, 2011, 5:25pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-we-look-others-in-the-eye/595908/32 "2011-09-13T17:25:14Z")
Ok, I think I now have a more focused question for the SD. To what extent do we know about the neural pathways that exist in higher animals that are invoked or activated when gazing into another’s eyes? It seems that there must be something built in to our cognitive systems that responds to the eye gaze, because, as we all know, there is something that is qualitatively different when we’re looking into another’s eyes, as opposed to looking into their nose or mouth, or even looking at their eyes from the side. (And have you ever just locked eyes on someone on a passing train for an instant? Something happened at that moment.) And some animals look one another in the eye, so it must be something quite fundamental in the neuroanatomy of mammals, and maybe other classes of animals. Anyone familiar with any relevant research? Cece? ---
**Author:** ![Blaster\_Master](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/cab0a1/32.png) [@Blaster\_Master](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Blaster_Master)\ **Post date:** [September 13, 2011, 7:01pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-we-look-others-in-the-eye/595908/33 "2011-09-13T19:01:41Z")
> [@engineer\_comp\_geek](#): > > 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. Facial recognition is extremely important and it’s one of the things that humans do extremely well that computers, for instance, struggle with. We need to be able to differentiate between other humans and non-humans for assessing threats. It’s also important to recognize caretakers, like parents, and strangers for dependence and that sort. As for eye contact, I think the biggest part is theory of mind. It is a way for us to know what the other person is thinking and what they think we’re thinking. If we’re looking eachother in the eyes then each of us knows that the other is paying attention. We also each know that the other has received any non-verbal cues we’ve sent and we know that the other knows that we’ve received any signals the other sent. And another part of communication isn’t just verbal and non-verbal cues, but also our understanding of what the other person understands about our message. We can quickly read reactions and gauge how the message is being received or how they think we’re receiving the message and clarify. As for the shifty eye thing, it’s something that I do sometimes, but not because I feel aggressive when looking someone in the eye, rather it’s because I’m keenly focusing on just the words and processing them and my eyes will naturally go off into space. Other times it’s because I probably don’t want them to see my emotional response or I don’t want to see theirs. Sometimes it’s because I’m just a little shy. Sometimes it’s because I realize I’m focusing energy on maintaining eye contact rather than on the actual conversation. I don’t automatically assign some level of shiftiness to it when I others do it to me either because I imagine they’re probably really focusing or shy or whatever. I only assign that shiftiness if there’s other aspects of it that give me reason to think so. ---
**Author:** ![MLS](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/919ad9/32.png) [@MLS](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MLS)\ **Post date:** [September 13, 2011, 8:00pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-we-look-others-in-the-eye/595908/34 "2011-09-13T20:00:01Z")
Here’s another thing I remember reading somewhere. Compared to other animals’ eyes, the amount of visible eyeball outside of the iris is quite large. It’s very easy to tell where a human is looking. I’ve also read that, on average, women are better able to discern subtleties of mood and personality; and girl babies on average are more attracted to any shape that looks like a face. Boy babies not quite so much. ---
**Author:** ![purplehorseshoe](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/purplehorseshoe/32/2996_2.png) [@purplehorseshoe](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/purplehorseshoe)\ **Post date:** [September 13, 2011, 8:59pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-we-look-others-in-the-eye/595908/35 "2011-09-13T20:59:50Z")
When my mother was really pissed at me, she’d focus intently on my eyes and then start rapidly shifting her focus back and forth from eye to eye. It means her eyes were constantly moving but would never break eye contact at the same time - an effect that’s disconcerting as all hell. I don’t know if it’s deliberate or even conscious on her part, but if it is, it’s mighty effective. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-we-look-others-in-the-eye/595908.md?page=1)