We’ve all been there, albeit for just a brief moment, as we unexpectedly catch the fleeting eye glance of a truly beautiful woman. It occurs as we’re bustling through a busy airport terminal or while hurriedly buying that last-minute item in a congested shopping mall.
Whatever the situation, we are intrigued by eye contact. Eye contact increases our pulse rate, decreases our dishonesty factor (we lie less often), increases our adherence to rules and norms and helps us to attend to subtle social cues.
The world around us contains a vast array of often rapidly changing information. If we attend to relevant information that affects us we are better able to figure out our environment and make appropriate decisions that affect us personally.
In my first novel Lines of Listening, I talk about the memories that we as children develop when we make eye contact with adults in our lives and how these non-verbal conversations don’t always match the verbal conversations that we encounter. However, these verbal and non-verbal conversations join to form a life-long conversation.
Recent EEG work has suggested that there are fundamental differences in our brain activity response to viewing another person in the same room compared to viewing that person on a computer screen. Viewing a live face with direct gaze results in more pronounced brain processing than viewing a photograph of that same face.
Recent social psychology research suggests that we may often avoid looking at other people in real life and this effect has been recently confirmed using an eye-tracking device. In contrast, people, and in particular their faces and eyes, strongly capture and direct attention when participants view photographs.
It, therefore, seems likely that people may not attend to other individuals in the same way when interacting in real life as when presented with a video. This may be something that we as public consumers want to study on a long-term basis since we constantly use a cell phone to communicate with each other in our daily lives.
In social situations, eye contact is highly informative. Looking directly at the speaker while also listening to the speaker can aid us in being part of the conversation. Instead of two people engaging in idle chatter or buzzing, annoying unrelated words, listening and responding to the spoken words that are in synchrony with direct eye contact makes for – wait for it, wait for it – conversation.
I’m not being facetious just making a point. Using a cell phone every day, all day may decrease our ability to maintain eye contact with the general public. If we aren’t looking into the eyes of the people next to us how can we understand the lives and challenges of the community in which we live?