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

It’s true that very shy or socially phobic people can have a lot of difficulty looking a relative stranger in the eye (and in the case of the latter, they can be totally incapable of that). 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 each other’s pupils. Why is this?

When maintaining eye contact costs

Dodging someone’s gaze has usually been assumed to be a sign of insecurity . The idea was that it is an unconscious and unwilling action that expresses a fear of being discovered.

This is not a crazy explanation, after all, the face is the part of our body where our emotions are expressed 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 of our limbic system, the part of the brain most related to feelings.

In addition, a person’s eyes tell us where they are directing their attention . They can literally tell us the direction of the next physical element he is observing, and can also reveal at what moments he is concentrating on his memories or on mental operations he is performing.

For example, when someone is improvising an excuse, they are more likely to keep staring at you longer than normal and their gaze trajectory will appear erratic and somewhat chaotic.

Over time, people learn that we can know a lot about each other’s state of mind by looking into their eyes, but we also come to the conclusion that the same principle can be applied to us. Therefore, without our realizing it, we learn that the nerves and the action of looking into someone’s eyes is a bad combination , 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 you spontaneously associate with “the bad”. In this way, even if we are not lying or covering up important information, if we are shy we will learn to look away as a strategy so as not to give 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 more reason not to look someone in the eye , thus creating a “fish that bites its own tail” type situation. There are more and more reasons to try to make the other person not know what is going on in our mind.

In this way, it can be said that diverting the gaze is a strategy based on irrationality and that, in practice, it is very unhelpful and even counterproductive. Unfortunately, being aware of this fact does not improve things, as it is partly beyond our control.

A new explanation for the inability to look in the eye

The explanation that we have just seen is based on learning and on the feelings that we have in believing that we should prevent the other from knowing something that we do know. Recently, however, another explanation has been arrived at 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 performing this task by staring into the eyes of a person whose photograph was projected in front of them, their performance dropped significantly, despite not knowing these people at all and not having to interact with them beyond keeping their eyes fixed.

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

In other words, we would not dodge the other’s gaze so much to directly hide our small expressive movements from them, but we would do so to avoid a large part of our focus being “hooked” on their gaze, leaving us without the capacity to perform other mental operations.