Eye-Contact, Distance and Affiliation
The theory the modern eye contact advice forgot. Argyle and Dean propose that gaze is driven by approach and avoidance forces at once, the approach side being the need for feedback on how our words are landing and a plain affiliative pull, the avoidance side being fear of being seen, of revealing inner states, and of watching the other person reject us. Because both operate, there is an equilibrium level of gaze for any pair, and exceeding it provokes anxiety.
The consequential move is to treat that equilibrium as jointly held across several channels rather than gaze alone. Intimacy is set out as a function of eye contact, physical proximity, intimacy of topic, amount of smiling and so on, so that disturbing one produces compensating movement in the others. Twelve empirical deductions follow; the paper tests two. In the first, twelve people were asked to stand as close as was comfortable to see a photographed face, a seated person with eyes shut, and the same person with eyes open, and stood progressively further back across the three, 26 inches, 31 and 37 (binomial p below .003). In the second, 24 graduate students held three-minute conversations with a confederate instructed to gaze continuously, seated at two, six and ten feet and at right angles rather than face on. Eye contact fell sharply as they were brought closer (p below .001), ranging across conditions from about 30 to 75 per cent of the time, and glances shortened from 9.6 seconds at ten feet to 5.5 at two. At two feet every subject showed signs of tension, leaning back, looking down, shading the eyes, narrowing them, scratching, blowing the nose. The experiment was replicated four times.
The paper is candid about where the theory strains. Eye contact never quite fell to zero at two feet even though people were plainly uncomfortable, which means either that the channels cannot fully substitute for one another or that the pull toward some gaze, for feedback and to avoid rudeness, is too strong to suppress. The opposite-sex finding also runs against the theory's own expectation. This is a 1965 laboratory study of two dozen Oxford graduates with a confederate behaving unnaturally, and the summary sentence is the one that matters here: reducing eye contact makes greater proximity possible, and greater proximity reduces eye contact. Read across to voice, it supplies the mechanism for why lowering gaze can make room for a harder topic.
Save this paper to a bibliography, keep notes on it, and export citations. Create a free account →