Maclaine Morham Sociology

Breaking a Norm - Eye Contact!

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Norms are social constructs which humans perceive and act around based on

what they have observed and been told throughout life. These social constructs are a loose set of interaction rules, such as how long to hold eye contact, walking with a symmetry of space between you and anyone around you, or the required amount of space between people on the bus for you to be willing to sit there.! ! When I began constructing my idea for breaking a norm I already had a fascination with eye contact. I watched a video which claims eye contact lights up a particular part of the brain which is activated at no other time. I was also under the impression that when people interact on a daily basis eye contact is not often a good thing. I thought that in many settings such as walking down the street or the hallway eye contact can be considered hostile or threatening. When I walk from place to place I dont really want people to look at me, thus I felt that eye contact should be quickly broken. It has appeared to me that other people often feel similarly. Thus I try to avoid eye contact in most settings in an attempt to avoid being perceived as hostile, overbearing, or intruding. I decided to break the norm that dictates we should have little to no eye contact when passing by someone walking the opposite direction down the street. ! ! I walked north up State street right in front of the school. The rst person I saw coming my direction I made and held eye contact until they had walked beyond my visual eld. I did this a few times as to gauge a pool of peoples reactions. I realized that I was not smiling after the 5th person, so I conjured a friendly smile and gauged the reaction of the next ve people. I wanted to try this in the school hallway setting but my fear of running into people a second time after breaking these norms was weighed as more socially damaging than the possibility of benecial knowledge gained. I tried to hold eye contact in a more obscure part of the redwood campus and found it much more difcult to hold eye contact than I had previously realized.! ! I found that when I had a poker face holding eye contact with the rst ve people their reactions were squeamish, to shift farther away from me on the sidewalk, and a look of uncertainty with a range between disgusted and fear were apparent.

Maclaine Morham Sociology

However as soon as I shifted to a friendly smiling face people mirrored me, smiling back. One man almost ran into me because his eye contact pulled him closer to my side of the sidewalk. Women tended to be best at maintaining eye contact and a bright smile, and although men were not bad there was a noticeable difference.! ! People reacted poorly to my poker face because when you look at someone you constantly gauge their facial reactions and when mine was impossible to gauge peoples evolution of determining uncertainty prefers to side with fear. However when I made clear I was being friendly, people displayed the same friendly smile back to me. I think there is a norm which directs people to smile back regardless of how they are doing. I think it may infer disrespect and if I were to not smile in return I would feel like I sent a negative reaction to The Cloud and that constitutes negativity to myself as well.! ! I was not expecting people to react as well as most of them did, I feared they would fear me and I do not want anyone to fear me. I thought eye contact was to be brief if non existent. I found eye contact can be fullling if both people react to each other positively. I learned eye contact was not good because one is not supposed to make eye contact with wild animals or the animal would become fearful and possibly attack. That and the rather unexplainable feeling I get when I make eye contact has driven me to associate the two and avoid eye contact unless the other person infers there should be eye contact. I expected a poor reaction but I think the root of my reasoning was actually that the benet of learning and actively making eye contact with others is less than plugging in my ear buds and creating my own world.! ! I conclude that the reason I had this norm embedded in my behavior is because the required attention, reasoning, and effort to get consistent positive reactions from whomever is walking down the hallway, was outweighed by the ease of just avoiding interaction in general. Though after a short research period about eye contact I found studies which suggest I would be much happier if I can convince myself to get said positive reactions from others more often.! !