Avoiding or breaking eye contact can indicate a variety of things. In many instances, it’s a sign of submission or discomfort. Although your instinct may be to run away from unpleasant situations or feelings, fleeing in panic isn’t really an option in everyday life because as humans, we aim to cooperate. (Unless, of course, the other person is threatening physical violence, in which case you run in the opposite direction as fast as your legs can take you!) On the other hand, at times avoiding someone’s gaze gives you a great deal of strength, appeal, and allure. It’s all a matter of whose eyes you’re avoiding and how you do it that creates the effect and determines the response. The following are the common reasons why humans avoid eye contact, knowingly or not:
- To ‘flee’ from an encounter: Evading someone’s glance, gaze, or stare is a defensive, protective action. It’s a form of fleeing from an interaction that stirs up in you a ‘fight or flight’ response. When you think you’re going to lose – whether it’s an argument or gaining someone’s attention – you unconsciously withdraw from the encounter by pulling your eyes away. Looking away from another person, avoiding someone’s gaze, and averting your eyes makes you look smaller. People who feel uncomfortable unconsciously make rapid and frequent eye movements, indicating that they’d rather scuttle away than stay where they are.
- As a sign of submission: When you look away from a person who makes you feel ill at ease you’re relinquishing your power and giving it over to that person.
- To avoid confrontation: As soon as a sign of confrontation appears, anxious people reduce the amount of time they spend looking at the person with whom they’re disagreeing. When you’re feeling anxious you avoid looking at another person. Your eyes search for escape routes where you can in effect hide from what’s going on rather than seek a solution. When it looks as if trouble’s brewing between two people and you sense one of them is going to lose, don’t be surprised if you see that person avert her gaze to remove the dominant person from sight.
- As a sign of uncomfortable feelings: People who are feeling ashamed, embarrassed, or sad, deliberately look away.
- To prompt another person’s attention: Pulling your eyes away from someone can show that you’re interested in her. This behaviour is part of the flirtation process and encourages the other person to go after you. If you do withdraw your eyes for this purpose make sure that you look back frequently.
The following sections discuss the ways that many people avoid or minimise eye contact and explain what these different manoeuvres mean.
The eye shuttle
When you observe someone flicking her eyes back and forth, you can bet that she’s subconsciously looking for an escape route. Notice that although her head remains still her eyes move rapidly from side to side. The action allows the person to take in everything that’s going on around her and see where she can reposition herself without obviously giving the game away.Dwight was at a business event where he saw Frank, a man he had met once before and whom he believed may be a potential client, or at least a valuable contact. Focusing on his own agenda Dwight made a beeline for Frank who was already engaged in conversation with two colleagues. Dwight re-introduced himself and without being invited, joined in the discussion. What he failed to notice were Frank’s eyes shuttling back and forth in search of the nearest exit.
Although Frank wasn’t interested in speaking with Dwight he was a polite guy and didn’t want to embarrass Dwight. While he smiled as Dwight regaled the group with stories and remained where he was standing, his eyes didn’t connect with Dwight’s as they scanned the room. Frank soon spotted another colleague and disengaged himself from the group, leaving his colleagues to deal with Dwight. Dwight never did do business with Frank, or his friends.The sideways glance
The sideways glance carries several meanings depending on how it’s given. It demonstrates interest, uncertainty, or hostility.
When you look at someone out of the corner of your eye and add a slight smile and raise your eyebrows, it would be fair enough for the receiver to think that you’re interested in her. If someone catches your attention and you want to let her know that you think she’s quite cute, look at her out of the corner of your eye and slightly raise your eyebrows. This gesture is mostly used by women and communicates interest.
If you’ve ever spoken to someone who avoids looking at you while shooting glances out of the corner of her eye, she may well not be very interested in you or what you’re saying. It may be time for you to change tack in your conversation, or move on.People tend to look towards things that interest them, and look away from things that don’t. Imagine that you’re at a party. Your partner has gone to talk to friends, leaving you with the singularly unpleasant host. Try as you may, unless you’re very polite and self-disciplined, your eyes stray in the direction of people or places you find more appealing. The brevity of your glances towards your host signals your lack of interest in her.
If, during a conversation, the listener shoots a glance out of the corner of her eye and combines the action with down-turned eyebrows and a furrowed forehead, you can bet that she’s harbouring a critical, dismissive, or hostile attitude.
The eye dip
Averting your eyes in a downward direction is a deliberate action designed to placate someone in a dominant position as well as an action designed to hide your feelings. In the first instance, by avoiding another person’s gaze, you are giving her permission to take the dominant role in the interaction.
Dipping the eyes is also a way of demonstrating the reluctance you may feel from entering into an interaction. By dipping your eyes you’re saying, ‘If you want to connect with me, you have to make an effort.’If you think that acting submissively is a weak or negative role to play, reconsider. Acting submissively can often put you in a real position of strength. And it’s sometimes the best way to get what you want. Also remember that, in this manoeuvre, you choose to relinquish control.
This is taken from “Body Language for Dummies”. It is a British book written about British culture. To what extent does this section on ‘avoiding eye contact’ apply to you and the cultures in which you have lived?
Based on the context, I truly agree that eye contact can indicate a variety of things. It can indicate that someone feels bored, sad, embarrassed, or anxious. Based on my experience before, when I did an interview to select the students about joining in big events such as POPSILA (MOS), I saw those eyes movement to know about their truthful or they just lie about their personality. Actually, it was 60% accurate to make some assumption about those candidates about their lies, their otiose to answer the question and so on. Wholeheartedly, we can’t judge the people feeling or personality just see from those eyes movement, it can be true or false, it just an assumption. For instance, when some people have realized that their eye contact really important for their interview, so they will do anything to make their eyes contact perfectly. Even they lie, they can mask their signs on the eyes, because they have discerned before.
ReplyDeleteDeo wrote: "Actually, it was 60% accurate to make some assumption about those candidates about their lies, their otiose to answer the question and so on."
ReplyDeleteTwo questions:
How can you possibly know that it was "60%"?
What do you mean by "otiose"?
Body language is the gesture you make and is the way of communicating nonverbally. Eye contacts are needed to improve the quality of interaction and creating a good connections with people, in other words, eye contact is necessary during communication. Eye contact indicates that you are confident and emotionally stable. I know some people who have this issue, they prefer looking down than staring at me right on the eyes. I can tell that they actually feeling discomfort. It is written above that avoid eye contact is to get a girl attention as a part of flirtation process and encourages her to go after you. This is interesting, I, personally think it is true that pulling your eyes away from someone shows that you are interested in them because I think it is the safest way to get theirs attention. By giving some glances and maybe a smile you can instantly get their attention without talking and acting. As a girl, I am sure that boys would use this technique, lets say that this flirting by eye contact is harmless. Anyway, I think eye contact is a must especially when you are working with team.
ReplyDeleteto complete my comment, eye contact is a must because when you work in a team you should show respects and try to understand other people, in order to put the most effort into showing respect and interest, look them in the eyes.
DeleteThere is a famous saying that says, “The eye is the window of the soul.” The eye is one of the important aspects in perceiving unspoken body languages. I agree that by observing someone’s eye movement, you can find some information about that person’s feeling toward certain situations. Breaking eye contact can convey so much meaning. It can mean different things based on how the person does it. From the text I infer that most of the time breaking eye contacts is the reason of exhaustion or anger. It may also tell that the person is not going to take the lead in conversation. Another eye movement such as looking from the corner of your eyes could also tell whether someone is interested in you or if they’re not in the mood for a talk. I am now aware about the eye movement of the person I’m talking to. I can now also avoid offending someone else in a conversation just because of my eye movement.
ReplyDeleteWhen we are engaging in a face to face conversation we have this feeling that we must keep eye contact because if we do not keep eye contact with the person we are talking with the we would just be disrespectful. Most people in Indonesia avoid eye contact when they are in a conversation, usually focuses their attention on other things whilst they are talking which to me is not a surprise, I have lived in England and I would see why it is disrespectful to avoid eye contact when talking to someone. Although, I can see why people are avoiding eye contact, maybe it is because they are uncomfortable or might be a sign of boredom and it is normal. There are several occasions where we must keep eye contact for example job interview. To conclude, eye contact is a sign of respect or interest that most people show when they are engaging in a conversation.
ReplyDeleteThe article proved how communication is not only about our skill to bring up topics to discuss. It is also about having the right body language to provide comfort and specific signals towards the other person or people involved. In this case, eye contact becomes the determinant whether an individual is interested in the conversation or not. It is a very interesting thing how simple glance and movements of the eyes can actually control the sense of the on going conversation. It made me think of how I have reacted in conversations with other people and how it has made people feel during the conversation. I believe I have personally done the three movements of the eyes mentioned in the article to give some kind of signal. The problem in avoiding conversation is when no matter how often you shift your eyes; the other person involved can still not get the signal you’re giving and tend to continue without having the urge to stop. That’s when we have to actually stop the conversation and confront our situation of, perhaps, being in a hurry.
ReplyDeleteI believe that eye is one of the most important body part a person can have. We can not live without our eyes and therefore eye brings so many effects to our life. One of the effect is when we talk to someone. When we talk to someone, eye is one of the indicator of whether our talking partner is interested in our talk, or simply they are bored with our talk, or just doesn’t feel interested at all. We can see this through how the eyes are working. When our talking partner doesn’t interested in our talk, usually they will just glance at another side, or just ignore our eyes. Eyes can be one of the way to communicate with others too. For me, I usually know what my speaking partner wants through their eyes, because from what I see, eyes do speak so much. But also, this can be habits too. Maybe not all of people glance their eye contact because they don’t feel interested in us, maybe it is just because they don’t feel comfortable to have a deep eye contact with us, so it is just a matter of habits of each individuals.
ReplyDeleteFrom the article above, It makes me aware that by looking at someone’s eyes, we can actually see many things. This time, I would like to talk about avoiding eye contact, that was mentioned on the first paragraph above .I really agree that avoiding eye contact can indicate many things. For me personally, when I avoid eye contact, mostly it is because I feel uncomfortable. I am a type of person who always avoid eye contact, I don’t have any specific reason, I just don’t like looking someone’s eyes for too long, It makes me feel discomfort. Due to that problem, It is very hard for me if I have to do an interview. About 1 year ago, when I took an english course for IELTS test in my city, my teacher accustomed me to have eye contact with her whenever I talked. I finally got used to doing that. Eye contact is very important, especially when doing interviews. So now, I have been able to make an eye contact with people.
ReplyDeleteEye contact is an important form of body language during communication. When you maintain eye contact with the person your talking to, it indicates that your paying attention with your talking partner. On the contrary, when you’re not looking at your talking partner, it indicates that you are not interested with the topic, and maybe you are finding a way to get out of that situation. Some people can tell when their talking partner starts to feel uncomfortable. But, many people can’t. So, in the worst case, we might just have to confront the person by ourselves. Eye contact can also indicate if we are lying or not. My mother can often tell when other people are lying. This is also the reason that police officers held face to face interviews, so they could tell if the person is lying or not. Therefore, unless you are a good liar, be careful to the people who you talk to. In conclusion, eye contact is one of the most important aspect in communication.
ReplyDeleteAvoiding eye contact may show the signs of defensive measures against another person in an interaction, or during the process into having an interaction. But there is one interesting point about eye contact during a fight. As a competitive fighter, not making eye contact with your opponent may exhibit either your arrogance over your opponent, or as a provocative gesture to mess with your opponent’s head. I have done that, honestly, not to exhibit my superiority but rather as a taunt against the opponent. When someone doesn’t look directly into your eyes during an interaction (in this case, the combat), they will develop a feeling that whatever they have to offer for you will not appease you whatsoever. Thus, they will actually try to make you turn an eye for them, in this case, temptation to be the aggressor increases, and when anybody fight not out of their consciousness but their temptation, that is when he/she is at the weakest state. Everytime my opponent fell for my bait and get tempted to go full throttle against me, that’s where the grand scheme begin : ambush. So, averting your gaze from somebody doesn’t always mean a passive/defensive gesture, it may be aggressive or provocative to that person, in some occasions.
ReplyDeleteWhenever I talk to someone, I always try to maintain my eye contact with them. I believe that looking at other things while talking to a person is very disrespectful and it shows that we are an arrogant person. Usually, I only look away for a moment when I am thinking about something. I do not know why but it makes it easier for me to think. The other thing that I want to talk about relating to eye contact is during sports. As someone who plays basketball, I always try to look at my opponents’ eyes to scare them or intimidate them. If I see that they look away it means that I can take this as an advantage and play against him. If he looks back at me and stare me down, then the battle will be interesting between us. Even though I contact is a simple thing, it determines who we are
ReplyDeleteThe title of the article made me interested to read it. Breaking eye contact can be a sign that the person is feeling uncomfortable with the situation or with the person who is talking to them. I used to be afraid and not confident enough to make an eye contact with someone who talks to me. But then I know that breaking eye contact with them means you don’t respect them. The person may think that you are not paying attention to them, although you are actually listening to every word that they say. Since I know that breaking eye contact is not a good attitude, I learned to make an eye contact with someone who talks to me. Tips that I always do to make an eye contact with someone when they are communicating with me is staring at their T zone. The T zone helps me a lot when I am communicating with someone. They could think that you are looking at their eyes when actually you are looking at their eyebrow or forehead.
ReplyDeleteI truly believe the statement in the article in which “Avoiding or breaking eye contact can indicate a variety of things” for this is basically the thing that I do whenever I feel unease, uncomfortable, or anxious. I believe all of us have experienced awkward conversations. As in for me, this happened to me few months ago when my dad took me to his friend’s for it’s been years since the last time my father ever spoke to him. I was okay when we arrived, until all of a sudden my dad had to go to phone somebody. They started asking me so many questions, technically it felt like they were interrogating me. Don’t get me wrong, they are nice people obviously, but the topics were too much for my liking, so my eyes went everywhere but them. My eyes were scanning around the room, wondering where my dad was.
ReplyDeleteI knew it wasn’t polite to have you eyes all over the room but them, but I suppose this is just our human instincts, our eyes would avoid or break eye contact to escape the feelings of uneasiness. However, breaking eye contact is not necessarily an act to express discomfort or to show negative remarks, sometimes breaking eye contact also means you’re nervous which essentially is not a bad thing. For instance, let’s take a simple illustration, these days even though technology innovation is getting bigger than it already was and guys tend to hit on girls over social media first to see whether the girl is interested or not. Yet, they still use the old-fashioned way when they first met, and this is where the eye contact usually occurred. I suppose first impression is very important and keeping eye contact means you care, it means you listen to them carefully, also in another case eye contact also shows sympathy or empathy.
DeleteNot only that, eye contact is also used to express or show attraction towards other people. When you like someone for example. You tend to steal glances when they’re not looking (not in a creepy way), or when you thought they weren’t looking, until your eyes meet in the middle of the room then you break the eye contact, afraid of what your crush might think. There are many reasons as to why we break eye contact in the first place, it’s not one that ever ends because as I told you before this is an instinct that every human has. Nevertheless, every human has different backgrounds and personalities. Therefore, not everybody has the need to break eye contact to show their discomfort. So to top it all, I agree with the article that avoiding or breaking eye contact can indicate a variety of things, though as I said before, it depends on the person himself/ herself.
DeleteOn the second comment,I made a mistake and wrote "to have you eyes all over the room" when it's supposed to be "to have your eyes all over the room"
DeleteAs human beings, we are social animals; communicating with others is a necessity to survive, be it verbally and non-verbally. Verbal communication emcompasses any form of communication involving words, spoken, written or signed while non-verbal communication includes body language, such as gestures, facial expressions, eye contact and posture. Although oftentimes trivialized, non-verbal communications, especially eye contacts, can affect people’s perceptions and exchanges in subtle but significant ways. Eye contacts generally shows confidence and respect to others and is a crucial act whilst communicating. However, for a lot of reasons, some people tend to avoid it and how they do it varies. These reasons include withdrawing from a potential argument or fight, feeling intimidated by, due to feeling down in the dumps at the moment, uninterested, reluctance to engage in conversation, shy or even signs or flirting to attract attention. I personally don’t think much of eye contacts, how and why I do it or the connotations it may bring as I habitually look at someone in the eyes while communicating and would only avoid or minimise it if I do not feel comfortable talking to them, when I’m feeling guilty for what I’ve done or when the conversation is boring. In Indonesian culture, especially some cultures which has hierarchies in the past, avoiding eye contacts with someone of a higher status is considered as proper while there is no formal difference in social status nowadays, it is considered as polite and proper for younger people to make eye contacts while talking to elders. However, prolonged and intense eye contacts are considered as staring and could lead to several misunderstandings such as having romantic interest in someone (when you actually don’t), being impolite as well as potentially being viewed as challenge and may cause anger.
ReplyDeleteThe eye tells the world so much with only a few motions and sends out these messages implicitly yet people seem to understand it so easily, as if it were a language we all spoke.
ReplyDeleteBody language isn't only expressed by our eyes. Our hands, feet and shoulder are a few other examples of body parts which we can read to understand how a person feels. The eyes give a reflection of our emotion so instinctively that it is impossible to hide, even if we tried. This, in my opinion, makes the eyes the purest form of emotional expression. What further intrigues me is how the eyes can show a persons character. As the article mentioned, you can identify when a person is a submissive type or not based on how they engage in eye contact.
Despite the aforementioned instinctive and instantaneous nature of the eye in terms of emotional expression. It is still possible to fake a reaction.
Eye contact is the key of our body language. We could know a lot of things by just seeing someone eyes. The ability to make good eye contact is a very important social skill. I always try to create an eye contact every time I talk to someone. I believe that by having an eye contact when we talking to someone make they more connected with us and show them that we are serious. By eye contact we could show our feelings and creates an intimate bond with the person that we talk to. Breaking eye contact is very threatening. If someone breaking the eye contact, it could mean that they are not interested or maybe they don't feel comfortable around us. This makes me feel worried that i could be very boring to them, because of the fear that someone think I'm boring, I always try to maintained the eye contact when i talk to someone. I know that I’m not that good on doing eye contact, but I try to improve my eye contact skills.
ReplyDeletePersonally, every one of us can see whether the people we are talking to are interested or bored or even dislikes when they are talking to us by their eyes. Eye contact determines everything because it shows the feeling of the person that were talking or interacting to. Some of the examples is like when tell lies, to people our eyes is going up which means thinking of something which, thinking in this context refers to the lies that we want to say to the people we are talking to. Then, when we are not interested to something, our eyes tend not to look and, in that point, we try to search for something which is more interesting. One of the interesting topics here is the last quotes which is “Body Language for Dummies”, this is a quotes that is basically true because as humans we can fake our body language but we always tell the truth that is represent in our eyes.
ReplyDeleteBack when I was younger I tend to shy away of staring someone in eye. Even back then I knew that it is very impolite to talk with someone while not having eye contact. As I grew, I tried to fix this bad habit. I finally able to fix this problem when I was in middle school. Now thinking back, I thought it was a bit stupid for me to be shy or scared at speaking with eye contact because with eye contact we can actually see their expression giving us their true purpose of speaking. And because of that in it’s own way, we can trust them more. With eye contact we also improve our body language. What I mean by this is, without us moving our head seeing the surrounding area this will help the person we are talking to understand us more because by having eye contact this also showed that we are in control of the situation.
ReplyDeleteEye contact is an important thing to do when you are talking to another person, especially if the other person is your boss or someone important. But if you break the eye contact, the other person will probably think that you are not interested in their topic or you don’t care about them. But even if some people actually do find their discussion is a little bit boring, there are some people that even though they are breaking eye contact with their partner, they are still paying attention to what they are saying. But I think not all breaking eye contact is a bad thing to do. As for an example, when you are talking to someone and explaining something to them, let’s say you are explaining a subject course, sometimes you would break the eye contact to think what you are going to say next so that you can explain it in an easy way and that they could understand what you are saying. All in all, breaking an eye contact with someone else could be considered as a positive thing or a negative thing.
ReplyDeleteOne of my friends told me that there are 2 types of people. The first one is people that make eye contact while talking, and the other one is people that looks at other poeple's nose or mouth when they talk. I'm one of the people that looks at other people's nose or mouth when we're making a conversation. I agree that not being able to make an eye contact doesn't necessary mean a bad thing, I am in no way being disrepectful nor do I have any intentions to make the other feel like I'm not listening to them. I'm just not very comfortable staring into other people's eyes for a long time, it's very overwhelming for me. It's not an easy thing to do but I know that sometimes an eye contact is a crucial thing in some circumstances, so I am planning on fixing that and learning to make eye contact with others.
ReplyDeleteI personally think that while we are talking to someone it is an obligation to look into their eyes. It is simply because I believe that if we have this eye contact to someone who we talk to it means we are showing them that we really are paying attention to them. We can easily find out someone’s response toward our talks just by looking into their eyes. Like for example, when we talk to someone we can easily know whether he/she interested with the topic or not. Imagine if we do not have the eye contact when we talk to someone, we can’t barely know whether he/she really pay attention to what we are saying or not and it is also very hard for us to know whether he/she understands of what we are saying or not. But I do agree, sometimes it is hard to keep having an eye contact like all the time when we talk to someone because it becomes so awkward if we look into someone’s eyes too long. That is why some people look around for a split second to break the eye contact
ReplyDeleteThere many way for people to be able to read others thought and feeling, and one of the best way is through the eye. The scariest thing is that we often did not realise about our eye movement or activity, therefore others could easily see our discomfortness and other kind of feelings that we had that very moment of time. I my self used to be really bad in making eye contact. Every time someone approach me and talk to me up close, for some reason i would always look down to the floor, look back to their eyes for a second (to anticipate them of thinking that i feel discomfortable), then look back again to the floor. This kind of behaviour happened to me since i was in elementary, but thankfully it progressively gone especially when i entered high school. Probably because in my previous school there was a lot of activities like presentation, debate, or group discussion, which i glad was really helpful on improving my eye contact.
ReplyDelete