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

Looking someone in the eye during a dialogue is essential. It is immediately noticeable when someone is avoiding the gaze of the 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 at the moment something.

It is true that people who are very shy or with social phobia can have a lot of difficulty looking at eyes to a relative stranger (and in the case of the latter, they may become totally incapable of that). The same goes for people with Autism Spectrum Disorders.

However, in certain situations, people who do not meet these characteristics may also find that it is difficult for them to look directly at the Pupils of the other. What is this about?

When maintaining eye contact costs

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

It is not a crazy explanation, after all, the face is the part of our body in which our emotions are expressed the most and best, 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 from our 

limbic system, the part of the brain most related to feelings.

What's more, a person's eyes tell us where to direct attention. They can literally tell us the direction of the nearby physical element you are observing, and also It can reveal when you are concentrating on your memories or mental operations that you are doing.

For example, when someone is improvising an excuse, they are more likely to stare blankly. for a longer time than normal and that the trajectory of your gaze seems erratic and with a somewhat chaotic.

As time goes by, people learn that we can know a lot about each other's mental state looking into his eyes, but we also conclude that the same principle can be applied in U.S. So, without realizing it, we learn that nerves and looking someone in the eye is a bad combination, because it can give us away.

Looking away in cases of shyness

When you are one shy person or you have social phobiaWhat we want to hide is precisely our own insecurities, which we spontaneously associate with "bad things". In this way, even if we are not lying or covering up important information, we are shy we will learn to look away as a strategy to avoid giving too many clues about our life mental.

But the anxiety produced by being aware of this strategy in turn produces more nervousness and stress, which gives more reasons not to look someone in the eye, thus creating a situation of type "fish that bites its tail". There are more and more reasons to try that the other person does not know what is going through our mind.

In this way, it can be said that looking away is a strategy that starts from irrationality and that, in practice, it is very little useful and even counterproductive. Unfortunately, being aware of this fact does not improve things, as it is something that is partly beyond our control.

A new explanation for the inability to look into your eyes

The explanation that we have just seen is based on learning and the feelings that we believe that we must prevent the other from knowing something that we do know. However, recently another explanation has been reached that does not contradict the previous one, but rather complements it.

On a study conducted at the University of Tokyo, a number of volunteers were recruited and asked to perform a word association task. The funny thing was when performing this task by staring into the eyes of a person whose photograph was projected before them, his performance fell significantly, despite not knowing these people at all or having to interact with them beyond keeping their eyes fixed.

This research could be an indication that simply looking someone in the eye is, in itself, an activity that requires a good part of our brain to focus on it. We could be predisposed to use many of the resources of our nervous system to process the information from the face of the other, and there are times when doing that makes us unable to do other things; have a complicated or thought-based conversation, for example.

That is to say, we would not avoid the other's gaze so much to hide our small expressive movements directly from them, but rather we would to avoid that a large part of our focus of attention is "hooked" in his gaze, leaving us without the ability to do other operations mental.