Why do fixed looks bother us?

Imagine that we are sitting in a park and suddenly we realize that a person is staring at us. What do we do? We look at it for a few seconds but immediately look away with a certain embarrassment. After a few seconds we can not resist the temptation and we check again to see if this person is still looking at us. If you are still looking at us, we will probably ask why, we will feel a bit uncomfortable and we will even be a bit alarmed. Why do we feel this way?

The answer must be sought in our most remote past. This way of staring is a means of threat to many animals and also to men. It is a real fight but looks.

A study developed at the University of Delaware while investigating the communication man-monkey, detected that when people approached the cages staring at the animals, immediately they began to show their teeth and swinging their heads threateningly. However, if people shook the cage but kept their eyes closed, the monkeys were attentive but not threatening. And it is that the power of the gaze can also be traced through the history of humanity as in many different cultures There are legends about the "evil eye", look that causes harm to the person who receives it. Even in clay tablets attributed to the third millennium BC there are references to a deity who possessed the "evil eye".

There has also been another parallel belief where using a fixed gaze served as protective magic so until 1947 most of the ships that sailed in the Mediterranean used to have painted protective eyes.

Why is there this taboo on the gaze? One of the possible explanations that are outlined refers to a lag of biological inheritance that we share with animals. Some experiments done with newborn babies have shown that the first visual reaction that small children experience occurs before a pair of eyes or any other similar configuration such as a pair of points on a white cardboard that imitate two eyes. Some theorists consider this as evidence that the human response to the gaze is innate.

However, there is another explanation. The place a person looks at tells us what is the object of their attention but does not give us any indication of what their intentions are, which is reason enough to feel nervous. This idea would also explain why sometimes we feel some discomfort in front of a blind person. Simply his ocular behavior does not give us any clue about his intentions.

Jean Paul Sartre once suggested that "visual contact is what makes us real and directly aware of the presence of another person as a human being, with their own conscience and intentions". When the eyes meet a kind of special understanding of human being to be human and sometimes we must recognize that this kind of privacy is avoided because it also scares us to undress the soul.

The gaze fixed on the eyes reveals a part of us, or at least we imagine it, which is the same. That is why when an officer reprimands his soldier he will send him to take the position of firm, where the look is lost to the horizon. Thus he avoids understanding it in his human essence and being empathetic with his situation.

Supporting the theory that states that the gaze is uncomfortable because it unveils part of our personality are the data that show that the gaze is more common in women than men because they have less difficulty showing their emotions.

However, not everything is negative in terms of fixed glances. One of the most striking findings refers to the relationship with the liking felt by another person. When one person likes another, it is very likely that he looks more frequently and that his looks are also longer. In the same way, when we are talking and our interlocutor is staring at us, this can be considered as a sign of high attention.

However, before putting an end point we must remember that the gaze does not have the same meaning in all cultures. For Americans, it is often a symbol of sexual desire, while for Oriental societies it is simply a sign of bad education. In Israel, looking at the other person is a very normal custom