Why Is It Sometimes Difficult To Look Someone In The Eyes?
Looking someone in the eye during a dialogue is essential It is immediately noticeable when someone is avoiding the gaze of their interlocutor, and in these cases it is assumed that maintaining eye contact with someone is uncomfortable, either because of shyness or because at that moment they are hiding something.
It is true that very shy people or people with social phobia may have great difficulty looking a relative stranger in the eyes (and in the case of the latter, they may become totally incapable of doing so). The same happens with people with Autism Spectrum Disorders.
However, in certain situations people who do not meet these characteristics may also realize that it is difficult for them to look directly into the pupils of others. What is this about?
It has typically been assumed that avoiding someone’s gaze is a sign of insecurity The idea was that it is an unconscious and non-voluntary action that expresses a fear of being discovered.
It is not a crazy explanation, after all, the face is the part of our body in which our emotions are expressed the most and best, and fear is one of them. The eye area, in particular, is especially expressive, because it is surrounded by small, very sensitive muscles that react to any reaction from our limbic system, the part of the brain most related to feelings.
Besides, A person’s eyes tell us where they direct their attention They can literally tell us the direction of the nearby physical element you are observing, and can also reveal when you are concentrating on your memories or mental operations you are performing.
For example, when someone is improvising an excuse, they are more likely to stare blankly for longer than normal and the path of their gaze to appear erratic and somewhat chaotic in movement.
As time goes by, people learn that we can tell a lot about another’s mental state by looking into their eyes, but we also come to the conclusion that the same principle can be applied to ourselves. That’s why, without realizing it, we learn that nerves and the action of looking someone in the eyes is a bad combination because it can give us away.
Averting your gaze in cases of shyness
When you are a shy person or have a social phobia, what you want to hide is precisely your own insecurities, which we spontaneously associate with “bad things.” In this way, even if we are not lying or hiding important information, if we are shy we will learn to look away as a strategy to not give too many clues about our mental life.
But the anxiety produced by being aware of this strategy in turn produces more nervousness and stress, which gives more reasons not to look someone in the eye, thus creating a “fish eating its own tail” type of situation. There are more and more reasons to try to keep the other person from knowing what is going on in our minds.
In this way, it can be said that looking away is a strategy that is based on irrationality and that, in practice, is very unhelpful and even counterproductive. Unfortunately, being aware of this fact does not improve things, since it is something that is partly beyond our control.
A new explanation for the inability to look into the eyes
The explanation we have just seen is based on learning and the feelings that come from believing that we must prevent the other from knowing something that we do know. However, recently another explanation has been reached that does not contradict the previous one, but rather complements it.
In a study conducted at the University of Tokyo, a series of volunteers were recruited and asked to perform a word association task. The curious thing was that When performing this task while staring into the eyes of a person whose photograph was projected before them, their performance dropped significantly, despite not knowing these people at all or having to interact with them beyond staring.
This research could be an indication that the simple act of looking someone in the eyes is, in itself, an activity that requires a good part of our brain to concentrate on it. We might be predisposed to use a lot of our nervous system resources to process information about another’s face, and there are times when doing that makes us unable to do other things; maintain a complicated or reflection-based conversation, for example.
That is, we would not avoid the other’s gaze so much to directly hide our small expressive movements, but rather we would do so to prevent a large part of our focus of attention from being “hooked” on their gaze, leaving us without the ability to do other operations. mental.
