Why is it sometimes difficult to look someone in the eye?

Eye contact is almost mission impossible for some people. Why is that?

Looking someone in the eye during a dialogue is essential.. It is immediately very noticeable when someone is avoiding the gaze of his interlocutor, and in these cases it is assumed that maintaining eye contact with someone is uncomfortable, either because of shyness or because he is hiding something at that moment.

It is true that very shy people or people with social phobia may have great difficulty in looking a relative stranger in the eye (and in the case of the latter, they may be totally unable to do so). The same is true for people with Autism Spectrum Disorders.

However, in certain situations people who do not meet these characteristics may also find it difficult to look directly into the other person's pupils. Why is this?

When maintaining eye contact is difficult

It is usually assumed that dodging someone's gaze is a sign of insecurity.. The idea was that it is an unconscious, non-voluntary action that expresses a fear of being discovered.

It is not a far-fetched explanation, after all, the face is the part of our body where our emotions are most and best expressed, 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 of our limbic system, the part of the brain most related to feelings.

In addition, a person's eyes tell us where he or she is directing attention.. They can literally tell us the direction of the nearby physical element you are looking at, 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 hold their gaze for longer than normal and the trajectory of their gaze may appear erratic and somewhat chaotic in its movement.

Over time, people learn that we can tell a lot about each other's state of mind by looking into each other's eyes, but we also come to the conclusion that the same principle can be applied to us. That's why, without realizing it, we learn that nerves and the action of looking someone in the eye is a bad combination, because it can give us away.because it can give us away.

Looking away 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". Thus, even if we are not lying or covering up important information, if we are shy we will learn to avert our gaze as a strategy to avoid giving 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 us more reasons not to look someone in the eyesThis creates a "fish chasing its own tail" situation. There are more and more reasons to try not to let the other person know what is going on in our mind.

Thus, it can be said that averting one's gaze is a strategy based on irrationality and, in practice, is very unhelpful and even counterproductive. Unfortunately, being aware of this fact does not make things any better, as it is partly beyond our control.

A new explanation for the inability to look in the eyes

The explanation we have just seen is based on learning and feelings that we believe we should prevent the other person from knowing something that we do know. Recently, however, another explanation has emerged that does not contradict the previous one, but rather complements it.

In a study conducted at the University of Tokyo, a number of volunteers were recruited and asked to perform a word association task. The curious thing was that When they performed this task by staring into the eyes of a person whose photograph was projected before them, their performance dropped significantly, even though they did not know the person whose photograph was projected before them. 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 eye is, in itself, an activity that requires a good part of our brain to concentrate on it. We may be predisposed to use a lot of our nervous system's resources to process information from the other person's face, and there are times when doing so renders us incapable of doing other things; holding a complicated or thought-based conversation, for example.

That is to say, we would not dodge the gaze of the other person so much to hide our small expressive movements directly, but we would do it to avoid that a large part of our focus of attention remains "hooked" in their gaze, leaving us without the ability to do other mental operations.