Why eye contact doesn't always matter

Strong eye contact can be hard for some people for a variety of reasons. It isn't necessarily a sign of being untrustworthy or lying. 

Shake hands firmly. Speak up. Make eye contact. These are all things I was taught from an early age. They were valued in the world I grew up in and those who didn’t comply were judged. Those “filters” remain and, even now, when I know a lot better than to make decisions on such little information, a small part of me struggles to believe people who don’t make eye contact aren’t “dodgy” in some way.

This is a mistake. A lack of eye contact can mean different things to (and about) different people depending on where they’re from, their age, their gender, their education and, of course, the situation. We live in a very diverse world. One way of making the most of it is to realise that other people always make sense to themselves. i.e. There is always a logic and if you want to understand the other person you have to get to that logic.

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Neurological and psychological explanations

The usual “filters” mentioned above impact how we behave and how we react to the behaviours of others. Beyond them, there may be neurological or psychological reasons such as psychopathy, PTSD, or alexithymia (sometimes known as “emotional blindness”) that would explain greater discomfort with eye contact. So would neuroticism, shyness, social anxiety, and autism.

One study showed how the higher a participant’s level of neuroticism, the more quickly they felt obliged to look away. The same participants also preferred it when their partner didn’t look at them. This is related to a specific aspect of neuroticism: withdrawal. It is related to feelings of inhibition and vulnerability and explains the desire to avoid eye contact.

That same tendency to avoid intimacy is at play for people with autism, according to Nouchine Hadjikhani, the director of Harvard’s Neurolimbic Research Lab. The brains of people with autism showed unusually high activity in the subcortical pathway, which processes facial expressions. This “oversensitivity” may lead people to try to decrease their exposure and so avoid looking others in the eye.

So Does Eye Contact Matter Then?

In short, yes and no.

It matters how we make eye contact because we can often get information from people’s eyes that we can’t glean through their words or tone of voice.

It also matters because it is associated with social connection and strong emotions. You can see that in this interesting social experiment. 

But we’re judging and being judged for nonconforming levels of eye contact. The U.K. organization Right to Remain has even claimed that some applications for refugee status have been refused because they didn’t make eye contact during interviews, and so were thought to be lying. Even though, as we’ve seen, something else entirely might be the reason. It could even be, in fact,that increased eye contact suggests untruths!

How best to deal with the situation

To improve your ability to refrain from judging others, which could lead to missing an opportunity to understand, you should Stick to the Truths and Watch out for the Potentials. In other words, focus on the facts or what you saw and heard. You can then share your Potential. Do this humbly, acknowledging that it’s simply your interpretation of what you’ve seen and that you might be wrong.

Improving your ability to hit the “sweet spot” with other people and the myriad different ways they like to make eye contact is a bit more complicated. There are too many variables at play, too many possible “filters” to be able to say, definitively, “this is how to make eye contact correctly”. Instead use the Process of Progress to focus on the result you want to achieve or how you want the other person to feel. If you don’t get that result you’ll need to change what you’re doing until you do.

So the next time someone you are speaking to is making too little eye contact, or too much, don’t pre-judge. Look at the big picture with an open mind.

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This article originally appeared on the HardTalk blog. HardTalk.info and PDSi-i.com