What You Need To Know About Eye Contact: 10 Facts That’ll Help You See Eye-To-Eye
This is part two of an article on Eye Contact. To read part one, please click here.
Six: If they’re displaying markers of discomfort, you’re making them feel uncomfortable. If you’re displaying these markers yourself, you’re making them feel uncomfortable.
Our eyes are excellent communicators of feelings, as well as indicators of comfort and discomfort. Paying attention to these markers helps us decipher others from a very young age. Here are some common indicators of discomfort:
A high blink rate indicates discomfort or tension, though in some rare circumstances it indicates arousal.
Darting eyes also indicates discomfort or tension. In some circumstances, the person is quite literally ‘looking for a way out.’ This does not necessarily mean that they are being dishonest, merely that they are finding a solution or an answer.
Shielding your eyes is a clear indicator of discomfort. It implies you cannot bear to look at whatever it is you’re shielding yourself from.
It is important to note though each of these markers on their own are not sufficient evidence of discomfort, however, when coupled with multiple markers or a change from the baseline of usual behavior, they can be used to established a person’s relative level of comfort or discomfort. As with any other non-verbal cue, showing these markers yourself (even subtly, as is the case with micro expressions) will make your conversational partner feel like you’re uncomfortable, a feeling he will quickly start mirroring.
Conversely, it is important to show as few signs of discomfort as possible if it is your goal to put your partner at ease. It is essential to train yourself to spot these markers in others, and to become aware of it when you’re displaying these markers yourself. That way, you can more readily correct your own behavior when necessary, leading to a much more comfortable conversational atmosphere for both you and whoever you’re talking to.
Key Takeaways:
Signs of discomfort: Shielding eyes, darting eyes, increased blinking frequency. Memorize them, learn to spot them, aim to eliminate them where possible.
Avoid showing these markers yourself; or, implement them to give off an air of discomfort, either to instill a feeling of discomfort or doubt in someone else, or to get them to empathize with your discomfort.
As per the recommendation in part one of this article, practice eye-contact until maintaining eye-contact in and of itself is no longer a source of discomfort for you. Then, try to eliminate as many other sources of discomfort as possible. Remember that, as a general rule, appearing confident builds an air of confidence between people.
Seven: Eye contact is NOT staring.
On average, people tend to look at each other anywhere from one to seven seconds before looking away. Additionally, on average, the speaker looks at the listener 40% of the time, while the listener looks at the speaker 60-70% of the time. A common exercise in courses dedicated to interpersonal skills – often followed by those preparing for a career in middle-management – to try and increase both these amounts by 10%. This is low enough to not come off as unusual, and high enough to create a noticeable difference in likability. Meaning, you should try to look at someone’s eyes 50-55% of the time when you’re the speaker, and 70%-80% when you’re the listener.
The golden rule for eye contact is as follows: To facilitate the building of rapport and likability you should strive to maintain as much eye contact as you can, as long as you feel comfortable doing so and without making the other person feel uncomfortable or threatened. To make that a bit more tangible: “Holding eye contact works best for 7 to 10 seconds in a one-on-one conversation, and for 3 to 5 seconds in a group setting,” according to Ben Decker, chief executive officer of Decker Communications, a San Francisco-based training and consulting firm.
While looking someone in the eyes more is generally a good thing, looking someone in the eye and never looking anywhere else is just plain creepy. Constant eye contact is threatening and uncomfortable for the other person. While being berated unfairly by your boss, for example, you’ll often show your disagreement by holding your gaze a bit longer than usual, as a subconscious act of defiance. Remember what we discussed earlier: Intimacy is good, unwanted intimacy is threatening and uncomfortable. When someone disagrees with you and they look you in the eye in a prolonged, direct manner, it gives you the feeling of someone trying to dominate you.
Key Takeaways:
A healthy level of eye contact can be kept easily by looking at someone for four to seven seconds, and then looking away briefly. As a speaker, this can be done easily as you naturally avert your gaze to formulate what you’re going to say next. So, to get that 55%, just do that a tad bit less, and make sure to be looking at someone whenever something important or noteworthy is being said or emphasized.
As a listener, it is also quite easy to maintain 90% eye-contact without creeping someone out. Whenever the speaker looks away, you can do the same. When they return to make eye-contact, you’ll do the same, your reaction naturally being a bit delayed. Occasionally, a slight tilting of your head, or a smile and a nod can further indicate that you’re interested in what he or she is saying, and give off the impression that you’re actively engaged in the conversation, rather than staring them down.
Remember the golden rule: Make as much eye contact as you can, without causing discomfort to the other person, and, more importantly, yourself.
Though out of the scope of this article, make sure to keep your gaze warm and passionate, or enthused, and not cold. An empty gaze comes off as eerie and terrifying. Some basic tips: Let your eyes speak by moving them around, and involve your eyebrows to emote surprise or interest or seriousness. Having wrinkles around the eyes, which you’ll usually see accompany a sincere smile, is a classic indicators of warmth. With practice you can elicit this look at any time, simply by imagining cheerful moments or thoughts that make you resonate cheer. Here’s an easy way to do just that.
Eight: Dilated pupils indicate interest and attraction. They also elicit interest and feelings of attraction. This is due to mirroring and reciprocity.
Pupil size is very important in attraction. If they dilate (grow larger), this is a sure-fire sign of attraction. If they constrict (grow smaller), that usually indicates disinterest or, in other cases, anger. Generally, if you are experiencing anger or other discomforting emotions, your pupils will shrink in size (fear is an exception to this rule). Reading someone eyes and noticing their pupil size gives you some of the most reliable information about what’s really going on inside their head, because pupils – much like other non-verbals cues – work independently of conscious control.
Try to imagine how the following facial expressions would look: sad eyes, happy eyes, angry eyes, piercing eyes, and bedroom eyes (meaning eyes that suggest we are sexually aroused, not tired). Next, find yourself a mirror and study your own reflection as you try to recreate those emotions. As you’ll notice, each expression has a distinct ‘look’ to them. Learn to notice these, and you’ll be able to tell a lot more about what another person is feeling, sometimes more than they are aware of themselves.
Wider pupils indicate excitement (which general implies attraction, though it can mean fear, among other things), and so your eyes (and you) will be more attractive as your pupils grow larger. Any positive thought can serve to dilate your pupils, so think of something that excites you, or think of a person that you love, or simply use your anchor if you have one. In one study, Eckhard Hess showed men two sets of images of women. In the first set, the pupils of each woman were enlarged. In the second one, the pupils of each woman had been made smaller. As a result, men generally preferred the photos of the women with enlarged pupils (i.e. found them more attractive), however none of the participants could themselves explain what made the difference.
This has been since been confirmed in multiple other studies, and it is very interesting to speculate on what precisely this implies. Perhaps this is the reason why romantic encounters generally succeed more often in dimly lit places – because pupils naturally dilate in those lighting conditions. Candlelight dinners are an example of this, and they tend to make us attracted to our dates much more than dinner dates in a bright-lit room, supposedly because there we are physiologically compelled to dilate our pupils (as it is much harder to see anything in the dark).
Of course, many other things weigh in there – just the idea of a candlelight dinner being a romantic notion will make it more attractive and effective to some, and similarly, some people might still hate candlelight dinners, even if they do still make their dates more attractive than other scenarios they dislike. Without doubt, however, dilated pupils facilitate the creation of human bonds of attraction. They also make a person more attractive. One of the reasons for this is mirroring and reciprocity. If someone has larger eyes, which signify interest, we will subconsciously become flattered as a possible subject of that interest. They strive to ‘let in’ as much of you as possible, and that is always a compliment.
Keep in mind, however, that some people may not respond well to that show of interest, such as some people that have low self-esteem, or people that have a low esteem of you. That is to say: Some people may not appreciate the compliment.
Key Takeaways:
Dilated pupils signify excitement and interest. They also facilitate attraction and human bonding. In summary, people with dilated pupils seem more interested, and they are more interesting and attractive than those with regular-sized or constricted pupils.
Try to notice it when a person’s pupils change size significantly. This usually indicates either increased or decreased interest and excitement, which makes you tell how involved and interested the other person is in your interaction, even when they might be consciously trying to deceive you into believing otherwise. Keep in mind, however, that there are many other reasons ones pupils could dilate or constrict, first and foremost a change in lighting.
Make some effort to get your pupils to dilate. This can mean drinking caffeine, or doing exercise, or imagining something that gets you excited – all little things will help. Most importantly, practice and apply the art of sincere interest, because nothing helps looking interested and excited more than actually being interested and excited.
Nine: Shielding the eyes (like with crying), can imply a (brutal) rejection of the speaker or whatever else appears to trigger it.
Turning away to avoid looking at something is an indication that you want to escape whatever it is that you are shielding yourself from. Eye blocking behaviors such as covering of the eyes, shielding the eyes, lowering the eyelids (for a prolonged period of time), and even slight delays in opening of the eyes are all behavioral responses that are so hard wired in us that even children who are born blind will cover their eyes, when they hear something they don’t like. This is a primal adaptation to combat stress and extended exposure to negative stimuli, which has served us quite well over numerous generations.
For this reason, and the implied lack of attention accompanying evasion of eye contact discussed in part one of this article, it is very easy for someone to get offended by a person averting their gaze, as that seems to imply they are trying to get away or block out them out. And again, this can happen without the intent or the desire of becoming offended, or even that person believing they have just cause for doing so. It takes only one or a few subconscious misinterpretations of such signals to create a stressful and tense atmosphere in your conversation.
And, since many people feel they are becoming offended without a reason, finding themselves judging others unfairly, or not even consciously notice that they are becoming offended or agitated, they have ample reason to not want to speak out and let you know about it. This is exactly why ‘Can’t you just correct that when he/she brings it up – no normal person would still be mad after that.’ is not a valid argument in dismissing this problem. As you know, people often don’t know how they feel or why they that way. So, don’t complicate things, and avert your gaze as little as possible.
It should be noted that wearing sunglasses, while not on its own indicative of anything, can be a confidence boost to the wearer, for two reasons:
Firstly, when someone isn’t comfortable with maintaining eye contact with another person, they can avert their gaze without the other person knowing.
Secondly, they can hide all of their own eyes’ markers of discomfort, as well as many other facial markers that allow other people to determine what emotion they’re feeling.
Of course, though wearing sunglasses can help in this way, it can also complicate a lot of things and diminish the success of your own efforts to communicate well with and persuade someone.
Key Takeaways:
Shielding the eyes can be interpreted an implied rejection and blocking out of whatever is being discussed or witnessed, or whoever is being talked to. Try to avoid it, like any other marker of discomfort.
If you notice someone becoming agitated for whatever reason, try to find out why! Ask them! Don’t let agitation ferment and get worse!
Since sunglasses and some garments hide communication signals, it can both be easier and harder to be intimidating or persuasive wearing them.
Ten: There are a lot of misconceptions regarding eye contact and lying.
The rebuttal of the first misconception regarding deception is probably mentioned more times on the internet than the actual myth: People who are lying do not make less eye contact than honest people. In fact, people who are lying will usually tend to look at the person they’re lying to more. There are at least two reasons for this:
They are aware of this myth, and will keep making eye contact to appear more honest.
They want to look at the person to see if the deception is working. When it does, they will often smirk in a very typical way (which will be covered in the course on lying and lie-spotting), or subtly breathe a sigh of relief, which is also accompanied by the eyelids lowering slightly and their eye muscles becoming less strained.
Of course, conversely, extended eye contact is only a possible marker of deception, and can mean other things. And, even if you could establish that you’re being deceived, it’ll be useless unless you find out why. The second misconception: Eyes moving side to side or to any particular corner of the eyes tells you whether or not a person is fabricating information, i.e. creating a lie. This is not true! It only means that a person is either processing or recollecting or creating information. This can mean anything and nothing!
For example, when someone asks you to tell them a story about a holiday you just took, you will often look in the direction that you naturally look when recollecting information (which differs from person to person as well). Now assume that, before you start telling a story about something that happened to you at some pool, you now look into the direction you typically look when creating information. Does this mean you must be lying, because you’re inventing information?
Of course not! Not necessarily, anyway. For instance, you might be creating a part of the memory that you cannot recall (like the spatial blueprint of that specific pool the story is about) so that you can summon other associated memories and then correct that initial blueprint. Or, even simpler, you might just be thinking of where you want to start telling your story, which is also an act of creation!
The third misconception: Liars blink more often, or conversely, liars blink less often. Both are assumed for different reasons, but both are wrong. It’s true that people blink more when under pressure, and yes, it’s also true that liars maintain extended eye-contact with less interruptions in the form of blinking. But specifically, according to the Journal of Non-Verbal Behavior, and reported by The Telegraph: “Liars blink less frequently during the lie, and then speed up to around eight times faster than usual afterwards.”
So, it’s important to remember: No matter how we perceive the meaning of excessive blinking, the opposite may actually be true. As with all of lying and lie-spotting, establishing baselines of behavior and noticing changes in that baseline might help you spot deception, but it never tells you the why behind the deception, or even what the deception is. People might feel they are deceiving you by omitting a detail that might not even be relevant to you. Conversely, a person might not feel like he is deceiving you and not give away any signals of deception even if what he’s saying is clearly untrue.
Key Takeaways:
Liars tend to look at you more while lying, they will blink less while lying and more directly after, and looking in any particular direction tells you nothing about what a person is thinking.
Though it’s good to be able to read signs of deception and avoid giving away them yourself, don’t rely on them too heavily, as knowing the what and why is more important than the whether.
Recap, Part Two
Six: Remember the markers of discomfort and learn to spot them in others and yourself. Learn how to interpret them, how to eliminate them, and how to utilize them to your own benefit and the benefit of the person you’re talking to.
Seven: Understand and appreciate the difference between eye-contact and staring. Take the Golden Rule of Eye Contact to heart: Make as much eye contact as you can, without causing discomfort to the both other person and yourself.
Eight: Dilated pupils indicate and elicit interest and attraction, and constricted pupils indicate and elicit the lack thereof. Use reciprocity to your advantage and make sure you have a reliable way of dilating your pupils. Always try to be genuinely interested in the other person, as interest is really hard to fake.
Nine: Be aware of the implications of shielding your eyes, and be sure to give off that consciously rather than subconsciously, and use it only when appropriate. Be attentive of the fact that such shielding in someone means rejection, but don’t assume that it is necessarily aimed at you. When it is, make an effort to change the behavior causing that rejection.
Ten: Markers of deception and discomfort are only there to serve as considerations in planning what you should be doing next. They are not be-all-end-all’s of communication, and you should never assume them to be any more than speculative. Use them to point you in the right direction, don’t let them decide the path you take.
Two other things to keep in mind:
Every key takeaway listed here, like everything else in the area of social skills and social engineering, is a principle to be applied, not part of a step-by-step guide to communication. They depend on context and are meant as general guidelines. They are not fool-proof and take practice to apply correctly, and only a fool would think that the entirety of human communication can be boiled down to a few lines on a piece of paper or an article on a website. Apply without hesitation, learn, adapt, then master!
Many things in human psychology, and social interaction in particular, are not so much about the actual why’s of certain markers and principles, but more about what people perceive to be the why’s. Something can become more effective or completely ineffectual based entirely on what the target (i.e. the other person) believes.
For people who just want to become more socially skilled, use these principles to try and understand how someone else is feeling and how they feel about you, and then adjust your behavior whenever you’re making them uncomfortable. They are just a few ways to make small improvements to your likability. For the social engineer, the same applies broadly, but most of your interactions will be too short-lived to take into account such minor details. Take the route that is most generally effective. Apply all of these principles, adapt them whenever you find they’re not working. That’s all there is to it.
Thank you for reading part two of our article on eye contact. Look out for the supplementary article to this one, ‘Exercises for Good Eye Contact,’ coming soon. Please like our Facebook page or join our community on Reddit to be immediately notified when it gets released! See you there!
Thanks for reading, and best of luck in becoming a better you!