The Definitive Book of Body Language - Barbara Pease [60]
When two people meet and make eye contact for the first time, it's usually the person who is subordinate who looks away first. This means that not looking away becomes a subtle way to deliver a challenge or show disagreement when someone gives their opinion or point of view. Where the status of the other person is higher, however—for example, the person is your boss—you can send a clear message of disagreement by holding his gaze for only several seconds longer than would be usually acceptable. But it's not a good idea to do this regularly with your boss if you want to keep your job.
How to Keep Eye Contact in a Nudist Colony
We sent a group of nonnudists to a nudist colony and filmed where they were looking when they were introduced to new people. All the nonnudist men reported that they had trouble resisting the urge to look down and the video replay showed how obvious it was when they did look down. The women said they did not experience these problems and rarely was a woman filmed intentionally gazing toward the nether regions. This is because men are equipped with a form of tunnel vision that makes them far better than women at seeing directly in front of them and over long distances for spotting targets. Most men's close-range and peripheral vision is far poorer than women's, however, which is why men have difficulty seeing things in refrigerators, cupboards, and drawers. Women's peripheral vision extends to at least forty-five degrees to each side, above and below, which means she can appear to be looking at someone's face while, at the same time, she is inspecting their goods and chattels.
Women's wider peripheral vision lets them appear to be looking in
one direction when they are, in fact, looking in another
How to Grab a Man's Attention
When a woman wants to get a man's attention across a room she will meet his gaze, hold it for two to three seconds, then look away and down. This gaze is long enough for her to send him a message of interest and potential submission. An experiment by Monika Moore, PhD, of Websters University, showed that most men are not hardwired to read a woman's first gaze signal, so she usually needs to repeat it three times before the average man picks up on it, four times for really slow men, and five or more times for the especially thick. When she finally gets his attention she will often use a small version of the Eyebrow Flash that is a small, subtle eye-widening gesture that tells him the signal was intended for him.
Sometimes a simple face-to-face verbal approach of “Hey, I like you!” is more effective on men who are slow on the uptake.
Most Liars Look You in the Eye
As we said earlier, many people associate lying with looking away We conducted a series of experiments where participants were told to tell a series of lies to others in recorded interviews. The recordings were used in our communication seminars where viewers were asked to judge who was lying and who wasn't. What we discovered was contrary to a popular belief about liars. Approximately 30 percent of the liars constantly looked away when they lied and the viewers spotted these lies around 80 percent of the time, with women having a better catch rate than men. The other 70 percent of the liars maintained strong eye contact with their victim, assuming they were less likely to get caught if they did the opposite of what people expected. They were right. Lie-catching dropped to an average of 25 percent, with men scoring a dismal 15 percent success and women 35 percent. Women's more intuitive brains were better than men's in detecting voice changes, pupil dilation, and other cues that gave the liar away This shows that gaze alone is not a reliable signal of lying and you need to observe other gestures, as well.
When a person's gaze meets yours for more than two thirds of the time, it can mean one of two things: first, he finds you interesting or appealing, in which case he'll also have dilated pupils; or second, he's