I had an in-class activity in my sales class where we partnered up with a classmate and stared into each other’s eyes for at least 30 seconds. We could blink, but we couldn’t talk or break contact throughout the duration. The goal was to see how long we could maintain eye contact before feeling uncomfortable and stopping. The average duration was around 3 to 9 seconds of eye contact.
I partnered with an acquaintance I previously worked with on multiple projects outside class. Feeling competitive, I had a strategy to win the activity.
The room got quiet. And I stared at her left eye for the first 10 to 15 seconds, then I switched to stare at her right eye. Everyone else had already given up 5 seconds earlier. But my partner gave up and looked away after 25 seconds.
Following the activity, there was a cascade of nervousness and awkwardness around her. We felt comfortable talking before the activity, but after the activity she couldn’t even look at me. We said nothing and parted ways.
Why do we feel weird staring into people’s eyes for longer than a couple seconds? Does it feel too intimate? Does something so simple really have that much power to alter our mood?
In 2010, New York City’s Museum of Modern Art hosted an event called The Artist is Present, where Marina Abramović, a Serbian artist and performer, sat silently in a chair for eight hours and invited random people to sit across from her while gazing at each other until they no longer couldn’t. At least 15,000 accepted the invitation, and the results were interesting.
Some sat poker-faced, some smiled, some cried. One of them was even Marina’s old lover who she hasn’t seen in decades. The experiment tapped into people’s emotions and pushed them out for the world to see.
It’s interesting how the duration of an eye contact can be the difference between an awkward encounter and an authentic experience.
Here’s my inspiration for the day.