Psychologically speaking, the eyes have it. A classic coin disappearance is a good illustration. Y’know – I hold up a coin in my left hand, “take” it with my right and, with a flourish, gaze at that hand outstretched to reveal … no coin. It never left my, um, left hand.
This is a surprisingly potent demonstration. Even as your brain says, “Yawn, it’s still in his left hand,” your eyes are following mine to rest on that empty right hand and there’s still that flash of surprise when the palm is empty.
But you can break this trick. The key is for the magician to keep looking at the right hand as it moves up and out but if, instead, they continue to look at the unmoving left hand, it breaks for many folks in the audience. Why?
Other people’s eyes, and the direction of their gaze, hold important non-verbal information. If we’re talking face to face and your eyes widen as you look over my shoulder, I’m gonna freak out because there’s something surprising or scary behind me. Unless it’s my son, and he’s messing with me. But hey, evolution says it’s better to turn around and be wrong about something innocuous than to dismiss a real threat.
The coin vanish is interesting because changing where the magician is looking doesn’t break it for everyone. The flourish is important too; we tend to pay attention to fast movement, for exactly the same reason as we follow gaze. That fast thing could be important.
But back to eyes. My colleague, Kealagh, often uses eyes when she’s talking about emotion as a combination of physiological response, behaviour and, obviously, feeling.
Lisa Feldman Barrett, an important affective scientist, tells a story about a date on which she inferred from the butterflies in her tummy that she liked her conversational partner. In fact, it was the start of a dodgy tummy.
When we like someone we’re looking at, the ol’ brain fires out a squirt of dopamine and oxytocin. Dopamine, you’ll know, is about rewards and feeling good, and oxytocin gives us warm fuzzies and is often oversold as the “love hormone”; they’re a powerful combo. One effect they have is to make our pupils dilate. When a woman is attracted to someone, their eyes dilate more if they’re ovulating.
If you’re wondering if they’re into you, stare into their eyes and look for dilated peepers. In fact, this happens unconsciously.
One 1975 study, reported in Scientific American by Eckhard Hess, showed that men found a woman more attractive and feminine if presented with a photo of her with enlarged pupils.
The “small pupil” condition drew inferences of “cold” and “selfish”, even though none of the participants commented on the eyeballs explicitly.
Of course, other things make our pupils get bigger as well. Like ambient light. This is why Kealagh goes on to talk about the classic romantic get-together; the candlelit dinner.
Before you go, source those drops the ophthalmologist gives you to look at the back of your eyeballs and remember two things. The eye doctor is just doing their job, they’re not hitting on you, and the dilation-attraction thing is a bit more nuanced for women.
There’s also some evidence to suggest that women who like bad-boy types report being most attracted to saucered pupils, while those who like ‘em nicer like “medium-sized” pupils.
Beware also that staring at strangers on the bus can be taken in ways other than “I like you”. It can be downright creepy, particularly when someone ignores cues to please stop it.
It’s a topic for another column, but we also find this intimidating, and some people who do it are trying to achieve exactly that effect.
