One of the most potent elements in body language is eye behavior. You shift your eyes meet another person’s gaze or fail to meet it and produce an effort out of all proportions to the trifling muscular efforts you have made. When two people look searchingly into each other’s eyes, emotions are heightened and the relationship tipped toward greater intimacy. In normal conversion, each eye contact lasts only about a second before one or both individual look away. Because the longer meeting of the eyes is rare. It is weighted with significance when it happens and can generate a special kind of human-to-human awareness. Most of the time, a lingering look is interpreted as a sign of attraction and this should be scrupulously avoided except in appropriate circumstances. A young woman once complained, ‘That man makes me so uncomfortable, half the time when I glance at him he’s already looking at me – and he keeps right on looking. Proper street behavior requires a balance of attention and intention. You are supposed to look at a passer-by just enough to show that you are aware of his presence. If you look too little, you appear haughty or furtive; too much and you are inquisitive. Usually what happens is that people eye each other until they are about eight feet apart, at which point both cast down their eyes. Much of eye behavior is so subtle that wereact to it only on the intuitive level. This has been demonstrated inelaborate experiments. Subjects sit and talk in the psychologist’s laboratory, innocent of the fact that their eye behavior is being observed from behind a one-way vision screen. In one fairly typical experiment, subjects were induced to cheat while performing a task, then were interviewed and observed. It was found that those who had cheated met the interview’s eyes less often than was normal, an indication that ‘shifty eyes’ can actually be a tip-off to an attempt to deceive. However, none of the ‘facts’ of eye behavior are cut and dried, for there are variations between individuals. People use their eyes differently and spend different amounts of time looking at others. Besides, no pattern of eye behavior is precisely predictable in any normal conversation.
